Jupiter System insight

This post has the purpose of explaining the motivation and the idea at the root of Jupiter System's development. The basic assumption is that platform like Raspberry Pi or ESP32 offer a huge range of possibilities at the pure software development level: you have a countless choiche of programming languages to use, there is a huge community which can support and there are plenty of already developed projects to clone or start from. All this power is mainly limited by an unique factor: the HW expandability.

Taking the Raspberry Pi as an example, we can notice that the HW is made up by three models:

• Model B

• Model A

• Zero

All theese models are populated with a standard GPIO connector which allows to interface the real world. To exploit the GPIO connector many expansion boards have been developed through years and they're now commonly called "HATs". The Raspberry Pi foundation itself developed a specification for HATs (HArdware on Top). But HATs got problems... they not always follow the specification (thus resulting in a wide un-standardization of these objects), have limitied modularity features, the resulting form factor of an HAT assembly may be quite difficult to box and they may be quite expensive.

To try to solve this problem we had the idea of copuling the RPi SW capabilities with existing standards able to overcome HATs limitations, all wrapped into a new HW platform.

The whole concept is resumed in the picture below:

To give an idea of what, for example, the MikroBUS specification allows to do just consider that there are more than 1000 click boards currently available on the market, and so many applications can be realized exploiting the power of raspberry (on SW side) and the high availability and modularity of the click boards (on the HW side).

The basic version of the Jupiter System is the so called Jupiter Model A, which is populated with four MikroBUS socket, allowing the user to implement a countless combination of peripherals. Below some examples of the Model A with some Click board fitted:

Say, just to make a simple example, that you want to realize some domotic applications where you need to control some loads (lights, water heater, other home appliance...) using some relays and controlling them through your smartphone. In this case you simply need to plug the needed number of relay click on the Jupiter Model A MikroBUS sockets and write the necessary piece of software using you preferred programming language. Below is depicted a picture of a relay click 3, which is quite suitable for this kind of applications.

As you can easily see the Jupiter System makes it very easy to develop a wide range of application, taking benefit from the HW expandability and modularity given by the high availability of different models of MikroBUS compatible devices. At the same time the system is 100% compatible with the RPi ecosystem, and so you can find a huge ammout of resources like forums, articles, projects to start from in your design.

In the next posts we will starting to show some possible sample use cases that can be implemented using the Jupiter System and we will go in more details for some of them too.