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How can I interface the PI to sensors ?

GreenYamo

Sorry if this has been asked before

 

I have experience playing around with the Arduino platform and interfacing sensors such as temperature, pressure etc.

 

I would like to know how this would be possible with the PI. I have seen the 'Gert Board' and also the board produced by Ciseco here: http://shop.ciseco.co.uk/slice-of-pi/. Is it as simple as plugging in sensors (and of course the odd LED or two) to the general I/O pins mentioned in the description for the last item and writing some code to read / write to these (I'm hoping in Python?).

 

Would I do better to learn more about I2C and SPI to get the most of the Pi ( I have seen you can do this on the Arduino, but i'm somewhat a beginner so keeping it simple at the moment). If so, can anyone recommend a good primer on I2C and SPI for the Arduino?

 

Given the power differential of the Pi to the Arduino in terms of processing power I think this would be a great platform to work on for this type of exercise.

 

Thanks for any pointers.

Parents

  • To followup months later image, the I2C bus is a simple way to interface sensors that support it.  I just wrote a post about interfacing the TMP102 temperaute sensor.  It is aided by the fact that it is very similar to how computers monitor internal temperature, so the standard 'sensors' utility "just works" and will print the temperature.

     

    I also have I2C accelerometer and magnetometer boards from SparkFun which I'm planning to interface in the future.  These will probably take a bit more work as I don't believe there are any existing Linux utilities to read from them.  But I don't think it should be too hard to port their Arduino librabies to something like Python on the Pi.

     

    I also have a ton of analog sensors, so I was happy to see Adafruit's Raspberry Pi analog input tutorial which shows how to interface an external ADC with the Pi.

     

    Cheers,

    Drew

Reply

  • To followup months later image, the I2C bus is a simple way to interface sensors that support it.  I just wrote a post about interfacing the TMP102 temperaute sensor.  It is aided by the fact that it is very similar to how computers monitor internal temperature, so the standard 'sensors' utility "just works" and will print the temperature.

     

    I also have I2C accelerometer and magnetometer boards from SparkFun which I'm planning to interface in the future.  These will probably take a bit more work as I don't believe there are any existing Linux utilities to read from them.  But I don't think it should be too hard to port their Arduino librabies to something like Python on the Pi.

     

    I also have a ton of analog sensors, so I was happy to see Adafruit's Raspberry Pi analog input tutorial which shows how to interface an external ADC with the Pi.

     

    Cheers,

    Drew

Children
  • in reply to fustini

    I also have I2C accelerometer and magnetometer boards from SparkFun which I'm planning to interface in the future.  These will probably take a bit more work as I don't believe there are any existing Linux utilities to read from them.

    It'll depend on exactly which accelerometer, but linux certainly has some drivers for i2c accelerometers. They're quite often used in laptops to detect that you've picked the laptop up off the desk, or have dropped it, and park the heads on the hard drive.  Probably lots of android drivers too, so that they can detect when you turn the phone on its side and rotate the display.

     

    A quick search reveals in-kernel drivers for

    "MMA8450 - Freescale's 3-Axis, 8/12-bit Digital Accelerometer"

    "Kionix KXTJ9 tri-axis digital accelerometer"

    "Analog Devices ADXL34x Three-Axis Digital Accelerometer"

    "VTI CMA3000 Tri-axis accelerometer"

    "STMicroeletronics LIS3LV02Dx three-axis digital accelerometer"

    as well as the WIIMOTE, Apple SMC and various others under staging/iio

     

    I've used the LIS3LV02Dx one as my laptop has one..

  • in reply to Former Member

    Terrific.  I believe I have an ADXL345BCCZ.ADXL345BCCZ. but will have to check tonight.

     

    Thanks,

    Drew