The Geeklabs Din Rail Duino is an ATmega328p based arduino board mounted inside a din rail enclosure with all pins broken out to screw terminals.
The range of GeekLabs din rail mounted modules came into existence in late 2018 when we were contracted to design and build multiple escape room controllers, props and games. We went through various breadboard prototypes to custom 3d printed enclosures to our final commercial grade din rail mounted enclosures. Prototypes tend to be messy and not very reliable. If you are looking for a way to take your project from prototype stage to a final professionally finished and installed product our range of din rail mounted modules are for you.
Originally designed for the escape room industry but have been proven to work in any scenario such as home automation, home irrigation, or any other finished project that requires a professionally finished and installed product.
KEY FEATURES
Every pin broken out to screw terminals
USB micro b port, easily accessible for uploading new sketches whilst installed.
Comes pre loaded with arduino boot loader and is compatible with arduino IDE out the box.
Reset button and status LEDās are exposed outside of the enclosure for easy reset and visual status.
@cprezzi yes the schematics and gerber files will be uploaded to git hub soon. Its based on the official arduino schematics with a few tweeks.
We are launching this as a ready made commercially available product for anyone that needs such a device.
We have developed the product as there were no existing products that suited our needs. Any other din rail mounted arduino compatible products were more geared towards industrial control with optically isolated inputs / outputs, integrated relays etc. These did not suit our needs. We needed to take an arduino and mount it in a din rail with all the pins broken out to screw terminals.
Our first set of prototypes included female headers for an arduino nano, the product just evolved to contain all the circuitry on 1 board.
We use arduino and other types of development boards such as esp8266 a lot. they are installed in commercial environments, mainly escape rooms. But an escape room needs reliability and be easy to maintain. Breadboards, loose jumper wires etc are 1 messy and 2 not suited to this kind of environment. We specifically designed this product to eliminate those problems. Din rail mounting is quick and easy and simply click into place. The screw terminals allow for secure wiring and in the event of any type of failure new boards can be replaced quickly minimising downtime for the room operators.
We have a whole host of din rail mounted modules that we have developed, such as a dc - dc buck converter with adjustable voltage output with 7 segment voltmeter display, a relay board, dmx controller etc. We are refining these products and will be launching them over the next few weeks.
So in a way yes its kind of an advertisement but more so spreading the word of a product that might come in handy for anyone who needs to take there project from the breadboard to a more professionally installed option.
We have these installed in other commercial environments too. We have one controlling an indoor koi pond, that automatically controls the water changes, monitoring flow sensors and opening inlet / drain solenoids, monitors temp and ph levels.
We are in our early days but we will be releasing instructables on different projects with full source code. We wanted to solve a problem and feel like we have, other people may indeed have the same problem and we hope our products and information and tutorials will help.
Thank you very much for the explanation. I can immagine that it could be useful for makers too (like for CNC controler cabinet). Sometimes itās hard to differ between information and advertisement. As an open forum weād like to share useful information, but not so much to be used for advertisement.
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@GeekLabs ā our request is that your posting here include general contribution to community interests, and not be limited solely to promoting products. We have already seen this post flagged by at least one community member as spam (separately from @cprezzi noting that it reads like an advertisement), so youāll want to know that itās being seen that way by community participants. Just join in the community and contribute to the community as a whole and folks will be happy to have you here, including knowing about your products!
If your only participation is to ādrive byā and try to sell products, itās less of a community activity and more of looking for an opportunity for free advertising.
On the other hand, if you would like to explicitly support users of your products here, we absolutely see that as a form of community activity, and youāll see that @raykholo and @Arthur_Wolf are examples of commercial suppliers supporting users of their products (and even users of competing products!) on this forum. The fact that they donāt limit themselves to their own products contributes to people trusting them with regard to the products they sell.
@mcdanlj I would very much like to become part of the community.
I understand as it being my first post many people may well flag it as spam but iām merely trying to get some feedback, opinions and thoughts on the product.
Iām hoping to try and help other people overcome the problems we encountered.
The ESP8266 was originally intended as a WiFi modem for other controllersā¦ Have you considered ESP8266 or ESP32 modem on this, just for programming it, using it for the original purpose? The ESP32-S0WD is I think the cheapest.
I havenāt considered adding it to this board as the intention was to keep it as simple as possible but i do have a design that incorporates the ESP-12E. Early prototypes were a din mounted board with female headers to take a nodemcu. We are still using these prototypes and have some installed in a couple of escape rooms that use remote resetting of the rooms and monitoring via an app using blynk server.
As with any project it always comes down to time but the plan for the future is to incorporate the ESP modules so any game within the escape room can
a) be monitored remotely from the gamemaster control room
b) each game can ātalk to each otherā remotely with out the need for cable runs
c) and each room can also have each of its games and countdown timers reset remotely.
This should help increase the through put of rooms whilst minimising staff costs to manualy reset everything.
I will probably work on a web based dashboard running on a local server to monitor everything.
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