Yes, at first glance this might look like “yet another hardware standard.” But that was never the goal. It started as a set of shortcuts while I was building my own boards and sensors.

The early versions were all over the place. After enough trial and error, I forced some rules:

• Ground and 3.3 V always in the same place (obvious, but a huge timesaver).
• 22 × 22 mm module size, no exceptions, so every board would line up perfectly.
• Analog and digital I/O fixed in place, with room left for I²C and SPI.
• I²C and SPI were separate modules at first. Later I realized it was cleaner to fold everything into a single 10-pin layout.

That last change took several iterations, but once it clicked, it made every new module easier to design and easier to reuse.

As more sensors piled up, I noticed they could be hot-swapped if I just added female headers in the same footprint. That was the turning point. It led to Genesis: an ESP32-S3 development board with eight AX22 ports, where modules snap in and out instantly.

I even tested this by making an Arduino Uno board with a single AX22 Port integrated when I realised it can be added to any maker PCB to quickly test sensors, and development boards would greatly benefit from this! This integrates plug-and-play modules with a classic microcontroller.

Here it is:

I kept going with more modules, more sensors and, eventually, it became a whole ecosystem.

Not planned. Just happened organically.