Ala Mode: Arduino Compatible for Raspberry Pi

We've gotten our first prototypes back and they are working well.

There's a complete writeup on my blog:

http://baldwisdom.com/introducing-raspb ... a-la-mode/

Flexible power. Can be powered directly from the Pi, standalone with a battery or wall-wart, or USB power. This is important if your shield takes more power than the Pi can provide or if you want to undock it for standalone operation.

Programmable via the Pi’s UART on the GPIO pins, or an FTDI USB-Serial adapter or ISP.

Header for connecting Fastrax UP501 GPS.

DS3234 Real time Clock. The Pi doesn’t have it’s own battery backed RTC. You can set a program in the AlaMode to report the time to the Pi via serial or I2C

Micro-SD card slot. Useful for datalogging, and big-memory for your Arduino applications

Row of Servo Headers connected to the PWM pins with a configurable power and ground rail

fustini over 13 years ago in reply to e14 Contributor

Just ordered!
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billabott over 13 years ago in reply to fustini

Hi, Drew. I was wondering with all you visits to Maker Faires, did you happen to come across the Hummingbird Robotics Kit or the Finch ( I think it is kind of like the turtle programming graphics idea brought out onto the desktop )?
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Lupo over 13 years ago in reply to e14 Contributor

Really interesting! I can't find the schematics. Maybe they are still moving from one site to the other one.
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e14 Contributor over 13 years ago in reply to Lupo

They are a little buried in our google code site, All our projects are mixed together and that's why I'm moving them to github. Just haven't had time to do it yet. When the migration is complete, each project will have a separate repository.

Here's a direct link to the PDF version of the schematic:
http://clockthree.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/KiCad/aLaMode/aLaMode-sch.pdf

Everything else in in http://clockthree.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/KiCad/aLaMode
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Lupo over 13 years ago in reply to e14 Contributor

Thank you very much. Your project is really interesting.
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fustini over 13 years ago in reply to billabott

No, sorry, don't think I saw either. But the Hummingbird does ring a bell as Adafruit talked about it on Ask An Engineer when they started stocking it: http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/09/13/new-product-hummingbird-robotics-kit/
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e14 Contributor over 12 years ago

How do I incorporate the RTC in my projects? I am fairly new; so, any help would be appreciated - links to libraries with good examples, etc. Thanks.
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Robert Peter Oakes over 12 years ago

an alternative to using a real time clock on the pi is to simply time sync with an NTP (Network Time Server) either at power up or at regular intervals once powered up, this is normally done by default and if not then this may help to configure it
h ttp://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/8231/how-to-force-ntpd-to-update-date-time-after-boot

If your running off line from the internet then of course adding one will help http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-add-a-Real-time-clock-to-the-Raspberry-Pi-o/describes one such implementation, Google raspberry PI RTC for plenty of examples

regards

Peter
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fustini over 12 years ago in reply to e14 Contributor

hi - adafruit has a good tutorial for adding a RTC: https://learn.adafruit.com/adding-a-real-time-clock-to-raspberry-pi/overview
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