Challenger Ramp – Duo Explorer
The Duo Explorer is a new board in the “Challenger Ramp” series which a collection of boards suitable for building complete systems. This board comes with a power supply that can take input voltages from 7 up to 24 Volt making it suitable for installations in cars or automation systems where these high voltages are common.
Description
The Duo Explorer feature
The Duo Explorer card can take 2 separate Challenger (or Adafruit Feather) boards and it connects them together. This is convenient for applications where you want to extend the capabilities of the Challenger MCU board, adding features such as ADC’s, motor drivers, relays or any sort of expanded function that you are looking for. It might even be your own board in there.
The power supply
The power supply can take anything from 12Volt up to 24Volts and uses an efficient switch mode regulator that ensures that it runs cool even when running high loads, although admittedly when supplying 15W it gets a bit toasty. The power is fed to each Challenger slot on the board through a schottky diode ensuring that no reverse current is fed from the USB connector on any slotted Challenger board(s). It is a 5Volt supply, capable off supplying up to 3A for all your power hungry projects.
The power supply can be power with as low as 7Volts but at this voltage level it can only supply ~0.5A to your system.
The power supply has a reverse polarity protection as well as short circuit protected so it will not break easily.
The power supply can be fed from either a standard OD 5.5/ID 2.1 barrel connector or if you are doing a more permanent installation there is also the option to use a screw terminal block on the board.
Yes it beeps
It comes with a beeper and a driving MOSFET in case you need to sound the alarm. This feature can be disabled using jumper block SV3 if it is not required and the GPIO (D5) pin can be used for other cool stuff.
Connectivity
To access the GPIO signals from the Challenger bus we also included a 26 pin Connectivity connector that allows you to easily hook up any external stuff that you might need. Here’s a list of the connector pins and their functions.
| Function | Pin | Pin | Function |
| GND | 1 | 2 | TXD |
| SCL | 3 | 4 | RXD |
| SDA | 5 | 6 | D11 |
| SDI | 7 | 8 | D11 |
| SS | 9 | 10 | D9 |
| SCK | 11 | 12 | D6 |
| SDO | 13 | 14 | D5 |
| GND | 15 | 16 | GND |
| A3 | 17 | 18 | 3.3V |
| A2 | 19 | 20 | VUSB (+5V) |
| A1 | 21 | 22 | VBAT |
| A0 | 23 | 24 | RESET (Active low) |
| AREF | 25 | 26 | EN (Pull low to deactivate module) |
There is also BConnect – Bi2C4 connector on the board that further extends the system with all the available BConnect peripherals.
All connectors are supplied with the kit but they are not soldered into place, that is left up to the builder as an exercise to do. We know that not everyone will want to use the supplied connectors so we left them in the kit as is.
LED’s
2 LED’s monitor the 5V and 3.3V giving you a clear indication that the system is up and running properly.
Schematic
