Olimex Launches Prototyping and Home/Industrial Automation Boards for the Eight-Bit AgonLight2
It's not quite driving a nuclear power plant with a Sinclair ZX81, but your AgonLight2 can now sit at the center of your home automation.
Bulgarian open-source hardware concern Olimex has announced a pair of add-on boards for the AgonLight2, its re-spin on the Zilog Z80-based single-board computer project — and there's one which will let your eight-bit microcomputer drive a home or industrial automation system, if you fancy it.
"AgonLight2 is small Z80 computer with plenty of RAM (512kB) and running BBC Basic," Olimex founder Tsvetan Usunov explains. "Beside the fancy graphics and easy to use it also has GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output] port available which allows different peripherals to be connected. We already blogged about the AgonLight2-Proto board which allows you to experiment and add external circuits to AgonLight2, now we present our next AgonLight2 board: AgonLight2-HvIO."
The AgonLight2-HvIO is, as the name implies, a high-voltage input/output board for the AgonLight2. A dedicated connector links it to the AgonLight2 and provides access to four solid-state relays supporting loads up to 1A on 220-volt AC power supplies, four opto-isolated inputs, and two connectors suitable for 1-Wire Dallas temperature sensors. In other words: everything you need for a basic home automation system.
The add-on boards come after Usunov forked Barnardo Kastrup's original AgonLight project with a view to recreating it in KiCad and with a range of cost reductions and usability improvements. Launched earlier this year, the AgonLight2 proved extremely popular — and while it might seem like an eight-bit processor from the 1970s isn't a great fit for home automation, let's not forget that the Z80-powered Sinclair ZX81 (Timex Sinclair 1000 in the US) was once proposed as being suitable for controlling a nuclear power station's systems.
The new high-voltage board design has been unveiled mere days after Usunov showed off the first prototypes of the Neo6502, a compact single-board computer itself inspired by the AgonLight but designed to offer full microcomputer functionality — including support for USB keyboards and HDMI-compatible displays — in a compact form factor and at the lowest possible cost, using a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller to stand in for the majority of non-CPU chips.
Usunov says the new high-voltage add-on board will be available next month priced at €12 (around $13), while the AgonLight2-Proto is now available at €4 (around $4.40). The AgonLight2, meanwhile, is priced at €50 (around $55) before volume discounts. More information is available on the Olimex blog.
