CA5 vers CA6

[Roy Marshall]

I was wondeeing if you should mention the advantage of the CA6 to the CA5 that I've been useing for years. And can I use the 4 valves I have with the CA6? Also will the demotion (inside & outside )and layout of the box be avable at some point so one my laser cut and laser engrave logo and labels.
Best wishes
Roy

[Maurice]

In the design guide I did list some of the differences in the hardware section: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pXaVV_2s77VWwlJIL0SPRABPESvaMm93XvzfyamElT0/edit#heading=h.cucp7d9ug3kf

That said I'm not sure how important it is to list the differences.  I really think the CA6 is so different from the CA5 you should just be looking at what the CA6 can do.  As an exmple it's not super easy to say how the CA6 module ports compare to the CA5 sensor ports.  Is it 4 vs 2?  Is it 24 IO vs 4?  I'd actually argue that it's even bigger than either of those because the CA6 also supports I2C, SPI, and lots of analog on a single port.  In the end the CA6 is a clearly much better, but explaining the differences is complicated.  The same sort of problem exists with processing power in that the CA6 is vastly more powerful, but it's hard to define in a truthful way.  The problem with UI is they are totally different and comparing them is difficult.

So while I could make a table that shows the CA6 is much better than the CA5 in every way I'm not sure how beneficial it is.  I think I'm more interested in just saying what the CA6 can do.  For more incremental updates I think these tables make more sense.  If you would like to disagree that's fine.  I'd like to hear what you'd want to see in such a table since that might help me understand.

The valve sensors for the CA5 won't work with the CA6 unless someone makes a little conversion dongle (this could be done using the dev module).  

I do plan to release the 2d cutting files for the modules that use that and I will also release the 3d files for the CA6 case and modules so people can 3d print those if they want.  This will all get release after shipping to the Kickstarter backers (beta users will get access sooner).