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Raspberry I/O galore in new Gertboard video

fustini

Howdy,

 

I was very excited to see a new video posted today on the Gertboard:

 

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/868

Here’s some video from Gert on the new revision of Gertboard, an expansion board for the Raspberry Pi which brings out the GPIO. There are some lovely demos of Gertboard enabling the Raspberry Pi to work with an analog slider controller and a motor here.

 

 

The Rev2 board looks like it is full of fantastic possibilities.  I'm very happy to see both an ADC and DAC.  Moving the slider to control the motor speed is a nice visual demo.  Gert has posted in the blog post comments a link to pic of DAC output on a scope:

http://img803.imageshack.us/img803/7035/dac.jpg

 

Another interesting development is that the PIC microcontroller has now been replaced with an AVR.  He refers to it as an Arduino in the video and has tested with an ATMega168 and ATMega328 (http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/educational-applications/gertboard/page-12/#p57407).

 

Gert closes by saying that a production run of 1,000 is about to commence and the plan is that they'll be ready in 4-5 weeks and sold via the RaspberryPi.org website store.  I believe it will be just the bare PCB, but blog comments from Liz mentioned that there might be a kit option, too.

 

Did anyone else dig the ASCII graphics in the demo? image

 

Cheers,

Drew

Parents

  • You have a couple of options for the Pi. The easiest one is probably serial/UART as Linux already supports it natively. There's also the SPI but the driver for it is still in development.  The AVR or any MCU for that matter is a great addition me thinks because you can theoretically install a firmware on it so that all Linux users have to do is send a command via the serial/SPI port to effect some control on the board  Something in the degree of  #>$SERVO1^180   to control some servo #>LED0^OFF         to turn OFF an onboard LED #>GPIO1^HIGH    to enable a GPIO  I myself have two of those STM32F4 boards and they are quite powerful but harder than usual to program due to the complexity of the ARM architecture

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  • You have a couple of options for the Pi. The easiest one is probably serial/UART as Linux already supports it natively. There's also the SPI but the driver for it is still in development.  The AVR or any MCU for that matter is a great addition me thinks because you can theoretically install a firmware on it so that all Linux users have to do is send a command via the serial/SPI port to effect some control on the board  Something in the degree of  #>$SERVO1^180   to control some servo #>LED0^OFF         to turn OFF an onboard LED #>GPIO1^HIGH    to enable a GPIO  I myself have two of those STM32F4 boards and they are quite powerful but harder than usual to program due to the complexity of the ARM architecture

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  • in reply to Former Member

    For control purposes the problem with the RPi is that it's general purpose IO is incredibly limited and that it's big bloaty Linux and preferred use of Python (which might change) make it very hard to add IO stuff and get a good response time. Your RPi driving ADC/DAC via I2C or SPI will go like a slug compared with  a little ARM Cortex with on chip ADC and DAC.

    So I can imagine why Gert wants a processor but I would have gone for an ARM.

     

    Of course - you then end up with a computer talking to a little processor which does all the fun IO stuff that you can understand  - so it's not so different from a PC and an Arduino - except that one exists and the other is imaginary.

     

    @ Morgaine - why not connect your STM32F4 discovery board directly to a PC and it will all work today (if it's too fast you could control it from an RPi emulation running on a PC :-)

     

    If the RPi ever appears in serious numbers I'll do an STM32F4 based board for IO (but not until Farnell actually have stock)

     

    Michael Kellett