Ideas for Raspberry Pi Zero Projects

Just finished the hardware side of a small project to use the Pi Zero as an internet-connected information display. Could be used to display emails, social media stuff, weather, time, ... I added two general purpose push buttons which can be used to cycle through the different options, or for confirmation or triggering an action.

How does it connect to the internet ?

MK

That Damn Elephant in the room again .. Would imagine WIFI in this case but in many you just don't have enough USB I/O

I gather that some of the IO pins on the Broadcom chip can be remapped so that they appear on the GPIO pins, is it possible to do that with the USB data lines?

I also saw something about using a serial to ethernet module, http://raspi.tv/2015/ethernet-on-pi-zero-how-to-put-an-ethernet-port-on-your-pi

I wonder if there's a Wifi equivalent?

It looks like some people are working on this

https://hackaday.io/project/8678-rpi-wifi-hat

Wifi dongle soldered to the data pins exposed on the bottom side of the Pi.

Although there is a lot of remapping possible, making it possible to wire everything to every pin is costly in hardware. So, on simple chips like AVR, pin 7 might be PORTB7 or SCLK. If you look in the datasheet there might be a few other names, but those are all "the clock pin of the SPI/Synchronous-serial module". On most ARM chips, each pin has a  choice of up to 17 different functions. But even then, many of the 16 Alternate Function (AF) slots are empty. Anyway, for say the SCLK IO pin of the SPI module you'll now get the choice of two or three pins where you can get that function. (Hmm. For an output I suspect that you can get both pins to act on that signal!).

For USB the situation is possibly a bit different. Even for "full speed" (12MBPS) the IO cell needs to be a bit different. So on all USB-capable chips that I know it is not possible to remap the USB function anywhere else.

That said: Why would you want to remap the USB pins? There is a connector on them, so you can access them. It would be more appropriate to ask this about the CSI pins.... Those are now unrouted on the 'zero so if you do want a camera, you're out of luck....

Although there is a lot of remapping possible, making it possible to wire everything to every pin is costly in hardware. So, on simple chips like AVR, pin 7 might be PORTB7 or SCLK. If you look in the datasheet there might be a few other names, but those are all "the clock pin of the SPI/Synchronous-serial module". On most ARM chips, each pin has a  choice of up to 17 different functions. But even then, many of the 16 Alternate Function (AF) slots are empty. Anyway, for say the SCLK IO pin of the SPI module you'll now get the choice of two or three pins where you can get that function. (Hmm. For an output I suspect that you can get both pins to act on that signal!).

For USB the situation is possibly a bit different. Even for "full speed" (12MBPS) the IO cell needs to be a bit different. So on all USB-capable chips that I know it is not possible to remap the USB function anywhere else.

That said: Why would you want to remap the USB pins? There is a connector on them, so you can access them. It would be more appropriate to ask this about the CSI pins.... Those are now unrouted on the 'zero so if you do want a camera, you're out of luck....

Roger Wolff wrote:

 

Why would you want to remap the USB pins?

Simply that the USB connector is on the side, GPIO is on the top/bottom. Just thinking about a wifi module that was as easy to use as a dongle but with the the form factor of a hat.

You could make a "shoe". :-)

clicks on the bottom of the 'pi' and has pogo pins to connect to the USB DATA pads on the bottom of the zero.....