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Raspberry Pi Gertboard In Action
An anonymous reader writes with news from Geek.com on an expansion board for the Raspberry Pi. Quoting: "In the middle of December last year the Raspberry Pi Foundation made a surprising announcement that not only would we see the $25 PC released in 2012, it would also be getting an expansion board ... called the Gertboard, and is being developed by Broadcom employee Gert van Loo in his spare time. When completed, it will allow Raspberry Pi owners to play around with flashing LEDs, electric motors, and a range of different sensors. It effectively takes the $25 Raspberry Pi beyond just being a very cheap PC. There's a video of the Gertboard already working which demonstrates the 12 LEDs being lit up and the board powering an electric motor more than capable of lifting something like your garage door."
Take that, Arduino.
I'll tell you what I told those bastards at Tesla Motors: I don't want to see it in action, I want to see it in PRODUCTION.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm very excited about this.
Especially as a learning tool for my kids, I think that by seeing what is happening they'll get very excited about learning to program.
I already have arduino boards, but it's not the same thing. Here we have a completely self-contained computer with great practical I/O interfaces.
Who are these people who keep on insisting on using through-hole components? That board could easily be the same size as the Raspberry-pi board itself simply by using SOIC packages as opposed to DIP for all of the ICs. Soldering a 1.27mm pitch SMT component is really easy, it takes about the same amount of time as a DIP component, and is much, much, smaller.
I understand from the Raspberry-pi website that it's gonna be supplied as a bare board + components, but like I said, soldering SMT stuff is really easy. Also if the whole point of this Raspberry-pi stuff is to teach people new skills, why not teach them how to solder stuff that the rest of the world is now using.
I know, it's great and all, but if you're using the pi to do the heavy lifting, and the gert as simply a way to output, doesn't an arduino already do this, and with linux too? Is this redundant, or have I missed something?
Plug it into your tv or ancient flatscreen. Wifi signal your video feed over the air for 25usd and some coding.
I think your imagination is useless.
I looked at the pcb pix and saw the SPI interface lines and incorrectly guessed the whole thing runs off one SPI connection, which would be kind of cool, since pretty much every microcontroller made in the past 30 years is either has SPI hardware support or is at least easy to bit bang SPI. So it would not really be a pi board, but a generic board that works with everything that merely has support to directly plug a pi into it.
However I read the comments and the deal is the breakout board brings 18 GPIO ports from the pi, and you wire the GPIO ports however you want to various peripherals at the GPIO level, one of which is a SPI interface port expander, other things you could wire to are the motor drivers, etc.
So its really a mostly GPIO board with exactly one SPI part, not a board run entirely off just one SPI port. For example, if you have an old fashioned parallel port on your PC, plus or minus some level conversions you could wire that up to this board, etc.
The other interesting comment I read was something similar to "if you want arduino shield support on a pi, simply plug an arduino into the USB port and plug the shield into the arduino and talk to the Ardunino using the linux usb drivers", which is brilliantly simple.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Uuum, I looked at those sites. And all I see is "in the pipeline", "if you have any ideas", "mailing list" and "could potentially be developed as X".
There are no ways to order anything, not even a name to call whatever they are doing. Not even pictures.
Either I overlooked something, or this is the king of vaporware and hasn't passed the "Well, we thought it would be cool to have X. But we haven't anything more to offer." stage.
Can you point me to a link where I can put my money and get a Raspberry-Pi-like board that I can plug my keyboard, display, sound, storage and network into, and install Linux on?
Yeah, we're all very proud of you, that you can solder teeny tiny little things. I can solder with a gasoline torch, you whippersnapper. Now get off my lawn.
The Raspberry Pi is a good litmus test for imagination. If you read or talk about it and have a tingle, you have an imagination. If you think it's pointless, you're dead inside.
Python makes everything cleaner.
# Make the 17 GPIO file systems & set them to output mode
for g in gpiotbl:
with open('/sys/class/gpio/export', 'w') as fout:
print >> fout, "%d" % g
with open('/sys/class/gpio%d/direction' % g, 'w') as fout:
print >> fout, "out"
# light effect on buffers
for rep in xrange(5):
for g in gpiotbl[:12]:
with open('/sys/class/gpio/gpio%d/value' % g, 'w') as fout:
print >> fout, "1"
sleep(TIME)
for g in gpiotbl[:12]:
with open('/sys/class/gpio/gpio%d/value' % g, 'w') as fout:
print >> fout, "0"
sleep(TIME)
test_motor()
test_motor()
sys.exit(0)
While the gp will have to account for the efficiency of their power supply as well, I'm pretty impressed w/the rPi. It looks really cool. Here is a nice nice overview, the power-suppy section links to the parent's "archives/260" reference.
From http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/260 Model B owners using networking and high-current USB peripherals will require a supply which can source 700mA (many phone chargers meet this requirement). Model A owners with powered USB devices will be able to get away with a much lower current capacity (300mA feels like a reasonable safety margin).
Arduino and Raspberry Pi are not competators in any way. They target two different markets whereby they have very slight overlap for hobbiests. The Pi simply can not compete with Arduino/AVR on the low end and Arduino/AVR can not compete with RPi on the highend. There's only a tiny intersection between the two and that's likely only because you have one or the other whereby a "close enough" solution is satisfactory.
AVR/Arduino has solutions in the $1-$6 range, if you want to use an inexpensive ISP and break out the coresponding pins on your bare bones or really bare bones controller. Not to mention, the pins are easy to access with a multitude of more pins available. It also has some capabilities which are simply not available without a Gert board, which makes the pi all the more expensive. Furthermore, an RPi is basically as barebones as you're going to see - at least for a while - if ever. Whereas for the AVR/Arduino solution makes it easy to transplant your Arduino project into a barebones $3-$9 project.
Furthermore, these two projects are really far and away much more complimentary technologies than they are competators. Basically, let the RPi do the heavy CPU lifting and the AVR's do the GPIO and bit flipping. Its a combination made in heaven.
I got fed up with it too, thats why I started MHVLib, a runtime for AVRs that doesn't try and hide its nature. My design philosophy is that embedded controllers are low on resources, and the runtime should be as lean as possible. http://www.makehackvoid.com/project/MHVLib