Infrared Board for the Mercury System

• User LED: by default it is configured to work in heartbeat LED mode (periodic pulses).
• Mercury Connector: used to interface with the other boards of the Mercury system.
• Address Dip Switch: to set the board address within the Mercury system.
• Programmer Connector: PicKit 3 Microchip programmer/debugger connector. It plugs straight into the microcontroller’s debug port, giving you advanced debugging and programming.

• ADC: 12 ch, 10-bit
• Comparators: 2
• Temperature range: -40°C ~ 125°C
• Operating voltage: 1.8~5.5 V
• Pin Count: 20
• XLP: yes

The set of boards making up the Mercury System is arranged in the following “families”:

• Base Board (BB): This is the “brain” of the whole Mercury System and holds the main logic unit, several communication buses and the connectors that interface the slaves. It also includes a simple power supply and a charger for a single LiPo cell (enough to meet the power requirements of simpler systems). It comes in several variants, depending on the microcontroller unit used.

• Modem Board (MB): this is the board that provides network connectivity. It comes in several variants, depending on the network interface (GSM / GPRS, Wi-Fi, BT, radio and so on). It interfaces to the base board over a dedicated serial line.

• Power Board (PB): this is the board that meets the system’s particular energy requirements whenever they arise. They vary according to the specific energy need to be met (high power, solar harvesting, piezoelectric harvesting, and so on).

• Slave Board (SB): these are the system’s peripherals and they vary according to the particular sensor or actuator fitted. Typical examples are SBs with relays, temperature sensors, RGB LED controllers, servo controllers, accelerometers and so on. They talk to the BB over I2C or UART with a dedicated command set.

• Expansion Board (EB): these are the boards that allow Mercury boards to be connected side by side on one plane. There are variants that can hold displays, a battery holder and so on.

• Brain-Less Board (BL): these are the boards without a controller. They generally hold really simple sensors or actuators that do not need the bus interface. They are an alternative to slave boards for applications where cost has to be kept down.

The Slave Boards and the Modem Boards come pre-programmed with firmware that implements a dedicated command set for high-level control, while the Base Boards carry a software framework providing all the low-level services (operating system, device drivers, system services and so on), leaving the user only the application-level logic to develop.

HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer): the purpose of this layer is to hide the hardware dependencies from the layers above.
SML (System Management Layer): the purpose of this layer is to provide services for managing the communication buses (I2C, UART) and for managing the Modem Board (WiFi, BT, GSM / GPRS). It also provides a set of system services such as System Power Management, RTCC, USB terminal and so on.
It is split into two main components:

• PML: peripheral management layer
• SSL: system services layer

OSL (Operative System Layer): this layer consists of a lightweight RTOS providing the system’s basic services, such as the scheduling tables for the various tasks, events, software timers, alarms and so on.

There are several sub-families of Slave Board:

• Sensor Slave Board
• Actuator Slave Board
• Communication Slave Board
• Interface Slave Board
• Special Slave Boards

The table below gives a few examples for each sub-family:

• Mercury System Getting Started Guide IoT and Connectivity Made Simple
• Slave FW Upgrade Package
• FW Package
• MS_SB320_Datasheet
• MS_SB320_Schematic