The Versalino system

Back at Virtuabotix I designed a line of Arduino-compatible boards called the Versalino, and the part of it I’m still proud of isn’t the boards. It’s the pin architecture.

The problem, circa 2012

If you built on Arduino back then, expansion meant shields, and shields meant stacking. Every shield claimed the entire header footprint whether it used three pins or thirteen, so two devices that each needed a handful of pins would happily fight over the same real estate. Your project grew upward into a wobbly tower, and every layer had to know what every other layer was doing.

The Versalino BUS

My answer was to stop treating the pin map as one shared commons and cut it into standardized ports instead. Each Versalino BUS carries the same even cross-section of the microcontroller: three digital pins, three PWM pins, three analog pins, plus ground, regulated power, and supply voltage. A peripheral that follows the standard needs exactly one port, not the whole board.

That bought some real advantages at the time: devices couldn’t interfere with each other, because nothing outside your port belonged to you. A design built for one BUS ran on any BUS (and would keep working on future, more powerful boards). And because the boards used 90-degree headers, upgrades loaded horizontally side by side instead of stacking into a tower. The whole thing shipped under a Creative Commons license from the start, which is part of why republishing it now is straightforward.

The boards and guides

The original write-ups are restored here with their original dates:

Where the design files are

I’m in the process of digging the original design files out of old drives and backups: schematics, board layouts, production Gerbers, the libraries, and the Versalino connection system as a whole. Each piece goes up on my GitHub as I recover it. Some of this hardware is over a decade old. I’m publishing it anyway, just in case anyone could still benefit from it.