Our Story

AURBEE Development Story

Aurbee Prototype

While reading the Aurbee specs, did anyone notice a close similarity to another fabulous Arduino Clone?

Aurbee uses the same Microcontroller (MK20DX256VLH7), as the famous Teensy 3.1, and the similarity is not a coincidence. Teensy has been a great inspiration for us, and we used a Teensy-based design to create our first Arduino clone (Mid 2013), for a custom project.

We did significant modifications to the Teensy stack, created a power saving architecture, wrote encryption libraries and integrated a BLE (Blue tooth low energy) stack, giving us our first CUSTOM Low power, Wireless and Encryption capable Arduino clone.

This module worked great for our custom project which mainly involved controlling the Clone’s I/O pins from an IPhone. Our friends (theatre Stage designers, Home automation designers) loved the new stable platform and we started designing all sorts of MIDI pedals, distributed lighting controllers, and intelligent home designs, but they soon ran into BLE limitations. The Master/slave nature of BLE was getting in the way of creating the Arduino-based Internet of things.

We had to switch to Zigbee. The currently available Zigbee shields do not really cut it. We had a hard time reducing the size and power consumption.

After spending sleepless weeks experimenting with every Zigbee chip we can get our hands on, we stumbled upon this 5mm by 5mm, brand new Zigbee compatible radio. (Expletives unnecessarily removed) We had to make Aurbee!

A few more weeks of grunt work, and we had the chip and peripherals mounted on a PCB talking smoothly with our Aurdino Clone over SPI.

We drew upon our decade of experience (and source code stash) to create The Self-routing Zigbee Stack, and started extending the Arduino libraries. So far we have extended many of the base functions Digital I/O

  •  pinMode()
  •  digitalWrite(Aurbee_LivingRoomLight, …)
  •  digitalRead(Aurbee_LivingRoomLight, …) Analog I/O
  •  analogReference(Aurbee_LivingRoomCurtain, …)
  •  analogRead(Aurbee_LivingRoomCurtain, …)
  •  analogWrite(Aurbee_LivingRoomCurtain, …)

We are in the process of extending other libraries (FastLED, Wire, TFT, LiquidCrystal) And also have Aurbee-specific libraries for raw data packet transfers.

Project Status as of Today

  •  We have a working prototype:
    • With the Microcontroller circuit, Zigbee Radio, USB programing board Mounted on separate PCBs, connected with hookup wire.
    • a “beta” self-routing Zigbee stack.
    • Basic Arduino I/O functions ported.
    • Stable Low-level Aurbee (Raw data transfer) library.
    • Integration with Arduino IDE for windows (as extension pack for the stock IDE).
  •  We have the Board layout (Gerber Files) for Aurbee Core (25mm X25mm), USB Programing Shield, UNO Adapter and OTA (Over the air) programing shield.
  •  We are in the process of scrutinizing the layout for defects and electrical characteristics before we do the (rather expensive) PCB printing run.
  •  We have signed a definitive contract with the Zigbee chip manufacturers to use their brand new chip.
  •  We are deciding which other expansion boards to build (Nano, pro). Your input is highly appreciated!