Overview

The Winkel Board is a powerful new Arduino-compatible, open source hardware platform for development and prototyping. It will help you put more time and focus on actually building and completing the important parts of your project rather than wasting it on routine, common-place, low-level tasks that characterize the initial parts of any electronics development project.

The Winkel Board is built on top of the Atmel ATmega128 microcontroller, but it goes a step further by including many popular peripherals such as WiFi, radio, and Bluetooth on board. Targeted at both entry and advanced makers, it provides a complete, integrated solution for many kinds of projects.

The Story Behind The Winkel Board

While developing an IoT product, our team wanted to experiment with different communication protocols, like radio, wifi, Bluetooth, etc. But we quickly found ourselves in a mess. While we had an Arduino board to get started, we had to purchase and configure many different shields in order to experiment with the different protocols. This was time-consuming and expensive. Here in India, shields are costly to source from overseas, and doing so really slows down prototyping. After talking to other makers and electronics hobbyists, we found we were not alone. They described problems such as:

1. You need your Arduino to connect to the internet, so you have buy an extra ethernet or WiFi shield.
2. You need accurate times so your controller can fulfill tasks at particular intervals, but this means you’ll have to connect a real-time clock to your controller or read time from the internet (for which you’re stuck back at problem #1 above).
3. You want to create a mesh network using radio nodes but have a hard time figuring out how to get started with NRF24l01 or you have to buy a radio shield.
4. You need to use Bluetooth in your project, but you don’t know how to interface a BT Module or you want to build a drone but find it hard to get started with MPU6065 with a micro controller.

Winkel Board solves all these problems with an all-in-one platform that combines a powerful microcontroller with an onboard WiFi chip, radio transceiver, Bluetooth, RTC and gyroscope+accelerometer.

You can use everything at once or specifically choose which onboard components you want to use in your project.

A) Jumper Pins for Smart Opt B) 16Mhz Crystal C) NRF24101 D) Atmega128 E) ISP Header F) Micro USB G) Reset Button

A) ESP8266 ESP12-E B) DS3231 RTC C) HC-05 D) CR2032

Winkel Board’s Technology

The Winkel Board is a microcontroller-based board that uses the ATmega128, an 8-bit microcontroller with 128 KB of flash memory and 4 KB RAM. The Winkel Board includes everything needed to support the microcontroller: simply connect it to a computer via a USB cable or a 5 V micro-USB power adapter.

The Winkel Board includes the following peripherals, built-in:

• WiFi module: ESP8266 ESP12-E
• Bluetooth: HC-05
• Radio transceiver: NRF24l01
• Real-time clock: DS3231.

Huge I/O set on a Small Board - Winkel Board has everything you would need to kick start a project and go advanced.

All of the built-in components use our Smart Opt system, which means that they can be powered down individually if your project doesn’t require a given module. With Smart Opt, you can enable or disable power going to the specific component with conducting jumpers.

Winkel Board supports OTA programming. This means you can burn your code on the ESP8266 and on the microcontroller ATmega128 wirelessly. Complete wireless programming is useful when a board is already soldered in, but you want to make changes to the code.

Dual MCUs

With the Atmega128 + ESP8266 ESP12E, the Winkel Board provides dual MCUs since the ESP is basically a WiFi module with an SoC. They are connected via UART (The Atmega128 has two UARTs) and can communicate with each other at the same time that they run their own code.

OTA wireless programming; Smart Opt

Specifications

Rebirth of Powerful ATmega128

See Updates section to watch the build video

Pinout

(Additional I/O pins are available because we have provided access to GPIO pin outs of the ESP8266 ESP12E.)

Comparison Table

Compared to other Arduino boards, Winkel Board is truly unique. While others can help a beginner learn the basics, they do not offer what’s really needed to get started with a real world project prototype that require other on board components. Other boards require you to find, add, and configure other components yourself, a time-consuming, expensive, and frustrating process.

Winkel board provides all the basic components for an intermediate-to-pro maker to dive into their super new IoT project, build an awesome mesh network, or start on constructing an awesome co-ordinated drone.

Say Hello to OTA Programming

There are times when you may need to update a program on the microcontroller while it is installed in a project, for example in an automated watering system, a bot, or drone. Rather than laboriously uninstalling and disconnecting the microcontroller, wouldn’t it be great if you could re-program it wirelessly? Welcome to Over-the-Air (OTA) programming.

With OTA, reprogramming is as simple as pairing the onboard HC-05 Bluetooth module to your pc/laptop and then using Bluetooth’s serial COM port to upload the new program.

Similarly, you can program the ESP-12E over WiFi. When you power the board on, the WiFi module automatically goes into configuration mode, allowing you to connect the ESP module to your WiFi network and retrieve an IP address assignment. You can then send code to the module from any connected device.

And, if OTA isn’t your thing, the Winkel Board fully retains the ability to upload code via cable.

OTA programming of ESP-12E over WiFi

OTA programming of m128 over Bluetooth COM using Arduino IDE

With the Arduino IDE you can perform OTA programming of the .INO files.

OTA programming of m128 over Bluetooth COM using AVRdude

For AVRDude fans, you can do the same thing using the AVR command line to wirelessly update the HEX file on the controller.

Build Examples

There are all kinds of things you can build with Winkel Board. We’ve provided a couple of examples below. We’ll show you some more in updates to the campaign. We are also working on a dedicated page to upload examples.

Wireless Sensor Network

Remote Control using Joystick

Manufacturing Plan

PCB manufacturing will be done in India or China (or both), depending on the number of pledges we receive. We will start shipping in February.

Status

We have been working on this project for quite some time now, concluding with a successful trial production run. So we are now ready to bring Winkel Board to every maker and need your support to build a community around it.

While the work and designs for the actual board are already complete, we are now working on a Tiny MPU-6050 Gyro+accelerometer mount for the Winkel Board. The designs and handmade prototypes are ready and we are confident we’ll be able to complete a finished batch before the campaign ends. Take a look at the prototype and a working example below.

This mount complements the huge I/O set of the Winkel Board along with its various comm protocol. It’s ideal if you are planning to build a balancing bot, drone, quadcopter, or maybe even a smart skateboard!

A tiny gyro + accelerometer I2C mount for Winkel Board

Tiny MPU-6050 (accelerometer + gyro) I2C mount

Community & Resources

1. Arduino Forum
2. Reddit
3. Instructables
4. Hackaday
5. Github
6. Website Main page
7. Winkel Main Page
8. Official Documentation page
9. Facebook
10. Twitter: @mintboxtech
11. Youtube Channel