Products:MIX UP

MIX UP is a shield designed for Arduino™ and compatible boards (clones and derivates) that allows to reassign any analog or digital I/O (excluded the digital 0 and 1, used for UART and hardware interrupt) to any other.

You can order MIX UP now from our eShop > click here

Introduction

Arduino™ is the most popular prototyping and development platform but present very common problems with conflicts on the channels assigned by the creators to different shields.

MIX UP is dedicated to the solution of this problem.

This is a very simple shield for Arduino™ or any other compatible board that allows, using switches, to route each single channel, analog or digital, to any other. With MIX UP you will be able to solve the conflicts in seconds, and to combine shields that used not to be compatible before. All this without the need of wiring and soldering, under the form of a neat board that can be reused an unlimited amount of times.

Description

WHAT KIND OF PROBLEMS DOES MIX UP SOLVE?

Two shields designed from different companies often use the same channels on the Arduino™. This makes it impossible to use both the shields at the same time, unless you modify at least one the shields or stuck with messy wiring to change the channels in one of them.

With MIX UP in a few seconds you can route the signals to different channels and solve the problem!

Many shields don't offer headers and some others cannot be stacked. This is a limit to the expandability of the system you are designing.

MIX UP allows to add more shields to the system, without requiring any soldering or wiring.

Finally, MIX UP helps you also when you need to use shields that don't offer headers but you still need to use wires, for examples to connect components located on a breadboard.

With MIX UP you will have an additional full set of headers available. And not just that! You will be able to reroute the signals without messing up with wires, just using the switches on the MIX UP board.

HOW MIX UP WORKS

MIX UP is very simple. As any other shield for Arduino™, MIX UP is plugged into the development board and provides a set of headers that replicate every signal, like almost any other shield.

The difference with any other shield for Arduino™ is that MIX UP offers a second set of headers, capable to host standard shields. These headers are not connected directly to the Arduino™. Only the digital pins 0 and 1, used for the data transmission and hardware interrupts, are directly connected to the development board. All the other analog and digital pins, for a total of 18, are connected to dedicated switches that allow to reroute the connection.

The routing

With MIX UP each analog channel on the Arduino™ can be connected to any other analog channel on the shield. Or even to all of them at the same time. The same is for the digital channels, from 2 to 14.

For example, the digital channel 5 on the shield can be connected to the digital channel 8 on the Arduino™, just by activating the switch D8 for that channel. There are no limits in the routing and the configuration can be changed as many times as required.

The doubled headers

It is a very common issue: two shields that are necessary for the project are not providing headers and are not stackable:

Only one of the two shields can be used at any time:

MIX UP offers a double set of headers so the two shields can finally work together:

Plus, if there is any kind of conflict with the channels used by the two shields, with MIX UP it will be easy to solve the problem, thanks to the easy-to-use routing capability.

MIX UP IS COMPATIBLE WITH ARDUINO™ MEGA

On the Arduino™ Mega and other compatible boards, the additional channels are free and can be used without limits.

With MIX UP it is for example easy to add shields plus use wires for the connection to a breadboard or to other devices:

MIX UP IS OPEN SOURCE HARDWARE

All the information about MIX UP, including the design files, are released as Open Source Hardware and is available for download from this website.