Yesil Otomasyon's Protocol Droid Talks Across Five Buses Simultaneously

Designed for embedded developers, the Protocol Droid can talk I2C, CAN Bus, RS485, UART, and SPI — all at the same time.

Oguz Aydin and Ali ElHayek's Yesil Otomasyon has launched an interface adapter designed to ease working with multiple protocols, offering communication over five buses simultaneously: the Protocol Droid.

"Protocol Droid is an interface adapter board designed to help embedded-software developers and enthusiasts test and improve their projects — particularly in situations where they do not yet have appropriate hardware with which to do so," the pair explain. "Protocol Droid communicates with the host over USB and with other devices using I2C, CAN Bus, RS485, UART, or SPI. Or all five at the same time."

The board can be used to transfer data, in either direction, between a host computer and a wide variety of attached devices. When Protocol Droid receives a message from an attached device, it is transferred to the host; when it receives a message from the host, it is forwarded along to the selected device.

The hardware — which supports I2C, SPI, and RS485 in controller and peripheral modes, CAN bus, and UART serial, plus offers general-purpose input/output (GPIO) capabilities with two pulse-width modulation (PWM) pins, two analog-to-digital converter (ADC) pins, and two digital-to-analog converter (DAC) pins, with 3V and 5V limited-current power supplies — is supported by a software package which provides configuration, control, and message sending and reception.

"This application is fully customizable and you are free use it in for your own applications. It is currently available for Windows, and we will have a Linux version ready by the time Protocol Droid ships to backers," the pair write. "Naturally, you can also write your own code to handle these tasks. In order to help you do so, we will publish a document that fully describes the protocol through which the board communicates with your host computer."

The Protocol Droid is currently funding on Crowd Supply campaign page, priced at $79.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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