What do you want?
I'm an electrical engineering student with an abundance of free time and no job. I have experience in electronics design and fabrication, and I can write firmware like nobody's business. I'm offering my time and effort to design PCBs and circuitry for any ideas you guys think might actually work or be useful, then distribute the schematics and parts lists freely.
So, what can I help make real?
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You buy a single processing unit and on the input side you attach a distance sensor and the distance sensor identifies itself to the processor during startup. On the output side you attach a solenoid and it identifies itself to the processor. Now you have a distance sensor which pulses a coil. Bottlenose.
Later, you decide to switch to an infrared thermometer so you can feel temperature so you pull the battery and plug in your IR thermometer. Once again, during startup, the input identifies itself to the processor and information is processed to the pulsing coil. Even later your buddy, who doesn't have a magnetic implant wants to try so you shut down, replace the solenoid with a vibrator, start it up and your buddy can feel temperature through vibrations.
This project could get big really fast and would be severely prone to scope creep. But if it is planned out in advance it might be a valuable tool. I can think of more than a dozen inputs and at least five outputs.
Just plug in a shield, reboot, and it starts spitting out data.
I'm thinking a thin base board that connects to a battery, and has either linear voltage regs or a buck-boost regulator that leads to the power rails, and a lipo charging chip so the device can be easily recharged off of a USB socket. It would also have a power switch.
The next layer would be the main core chip, which would have the teensy, a status RGB LED and some buttons.
My only concern would be stacking too many things, it would pretty quickly lose its portability. I think this is a good point to start with though, worry about minimization later.
Autorouted a basic base board. Teensy, charging IC with LED, battery terminal, and two busses for shields.
@ElectricFeel I bet you can do better than the autorouter, give it a try.
Single-in/single-out would be very simple and small, basically two boards that snap together and go, everything would be well defined. The others make the layout more complex and require more user customization to work (what to display from what input, etc).
I also opt for a single battery. Many small batteries waste space as big parts are just the mechanics of the battery instead of the chemistry storing the energy. A single-master system should be perfectly fine.