RabbitMax Flex is an open source hardware Raspberry Pi HAT (add-on board) for rapid prototyping of Internet of Things (IoT) powered by free and open source software. It features:
- IR transmitter (IR LED)
- IR receiver (IR photo sensor)
- Relay
- Piezoelectric speaker (buzzer)
- Button
- RGB LED
- Slot for modular 16x2 LCD character display
- Slots for up to 5 plug and play I2C sensors for temperature, barometric pressure, humidity and light
- UART (Universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter) pins for debugging
Support the project by backing RabbitMax Flex IndieGoGo campaign.
RabbitMax started as a small hobby project by Leon Anavi in November 2015. Initially the project was using off the shelf components but soon after that Leon decided to create his own Raspberry Pi HAT for easy IoT prototyping.
Inspired by Olimex and Tsvetan Uzunov's presentations about open source hardware at FOSDEM and Hackaday Belgrade, Leon insisted on using the free and open source electronics design automation suite KiCAD for the PCB design. In April 2016, the software engineer Leon bought his first soldering iron from Olimex and started working on the first hardware prototypes.
Designing PCB requires a lot of hardware skills and experience so Leon needed help. It was not easy to find a suitable hardware engineer familiar with KiCAD. After making a lot of contacts and speaking to various engineers finally Leon found the right people. Thanks to the PCB manufacturing services of OSH Park the first PCB prototypes were ready at the end of June 2016.
As expected the first version was far from perfect. There were a few bugs which were quickly fixed. The next hardware revision and a small-run batch was ready in August 2016. It featured a new buzzer, a new button and a potentiometer for controlling the light and contrast of the LCD display module.
In September 2016, after a lot of hard work, the first version of the user's manual of RabbitMax Flex was released with open source examples written in Python and the C programming language.
In October 2016 first prototypes of RabbitMax Flex were shipped to developers and bloggers. Another hardware revision with minor improvements was made and a small quantity of RabbitMax Flex Raspberry Pi HATs was released on sale and quickly went out of stock in Tindie.
On 1 November 2016 RabbitMax Flex crowdfunding campaign was launched in IndieGoGo.
RabbitMax Flex Raspberry Pi HAT hardware project is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
You may reproduce it for both your own personal use, and for commertial use. You will have to provide a link to the original creator of the project http://www.rabbitmax.com on any documentation or website.
You may also modify the files, but you must then release them as well under the same terms.
Credit can be attributed through a link to the creator website: http://www.rabbitmax.com