RasPiO Pro Hat

I recently backed Alex Eames (@RasPiTV) Kickstarter campaign for a RasPiO Pro Hat which is a small add-on board for the Raspberry Pi and is designed to protect and put your GPIO ports in numerical order.   The Kickstarter campaign has been successfully funded so boards are starting to be shipped out, mine landed on the doormat the other day.  

The RasPiO®1 Pro Hat has the GPIO pins connected via a protection circuit to female headers but is also broken out to un-protected connections. There is a small breadboard for prototyping circuits.  The PCB is very nicely made and is complete with gold and white silkscreen text.

I tried out my board using the included RGB LED and a simple GPIOZero Python script. There is well written manual which contains some structured experiments for the included components.

Overall I very impressed with this great little add-on for the Raspberry Pi,  if you want one for yourself then you can find out more on the RasPiO website. 

Croc clip connector for the Raspberry Pi

Andrew Gale (@pocketmoneytron) from pocketmoneytronics recently sent me a couple of his brilliant croc clip connector boards for the Raspberry Pi he had made.

The board is very simple, well designed and has three large holes so you can easily connect crocodile clips to the board. GPIO pins 23, 24 and 25 have been brought out to the edge via a series resistor along with a ground connection so that LED's can be attached.

I used a simple Python script using the new GPIO Zero library to test out the board, which is really easy to use and the boards work well. Overall I am very impressed with this great project.

Croc clip Parts

Croc clip PCB Assembled

Traffic Lights 

The PiTrol

Nevil Hunt from Innovations in Education has come up with a Raspberry Pi add-on called “The PiTrol” designed to encourage children to write their own computer games in Python.  The PiTrol is a Pi-shaped games controller that plugs into the GPIO connector of the Raspberry Pi allowing computer games to be controlled with a 5-way joystick and 5 push-buttons.

Nevil was looking for beta testers so I volunteered, my kit arrived this week.  

The PiTrol kit contents, oh so many parts.

The PiTrol fully assembled

Assembly of the kit took about 45 minutes though less experienced constructors may take longer, the assembly instructions are very thorough and easy to follow.   The kit uses all ‘through-hole’ parts so none of that tiny SMD stuff which can easily be lost if you sneeze.   I did use IC sockets for the integrated circuits as I'm not a fan of soldering IC's directly to the PCB.

  

I downloaded and ran the Python test program from Nevil’s PiTrol webpage, the program tests that the PiTrol is working correctly.  The test Python program is well commented which makes it easy to understand.

Once I had made sure everything worked correctly, I started on the seven steps to PiTrol wormy which takes the pre-written Python wormy game and shows you how to modify it step by step so that it works with the PiTrol rather than using your keyboard.  I have successfully completed step 1 so only 6 more steps to go until I have fully working PiTrol controlled wormy game.

In summary I think that Nevil has come up with another great Raspberry Pi add-on board, it covers all your project and learning needs.

 

If you would like your own, then head over to ThePiTrol website for more information.

A Christmas tree for your Raspberry Pi

I recently backed Andrew Gale’s short Kickstarter campaign for a small soldering kit shaped like a Christmas tree complete with several LEDs. It only uses 4 GPIO pins to control 7 LEDs and it does this by charlieplexing.   The Kickstarter campaign has successfully been funded so Andrew has started to send out the kits, mine landed on the doormat today.

Christmas tree parts

First impressions, the PCB looks well made and is nicely laid out. The instructions are very clear and easy to follow.   Also included with my kit was the bi-colour LED which can be used in place of the yellow LED at the top of the tree.

It took me no less than 10 minutes to solder the kit together due to the low component count, though some less experienced constructors may take longer.  Upon finishing the kit, I plugged it into my Raspberry Pi and tried some of the example Python code which worked well.

Completed Christmas tree

All in all I am very impressed with this kit.  It’s a great little project to learn to solder on and it makes a nice little Christmas decoration for your Raspberry Pi.

You can find out more about this kit on Andrew’s website