Raspberry HAT <-> Pyboard adapter

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marfis
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Re: Raspberry HAT <-> Pyboard adapter

Post by marfis » Sun Jan 17, 2016 10:15 pm

worked in review and ended up in changing quite a bit of stuff:
- removed onboard neopixel footprints - they occupied too much space and it's easier to connect them externally.
- support for raspi's GPIO's up to pin 28 (which should provide support for most HAT's I believe)
- 3V3 jumper
- Pyboard "reset via Raspi" selectable by jumper

@dhylands: I initally placed the 5V Jumper but then removed it because the use-case for such a setup would be rare I believe. Backpowering the RPi should be ok because of the Pyboard's diode. The neopixel's supply is independent (if sourced externally).

As a summary I believe it should work with most of the HAT's available, specifically Adafruit's boards. I checked some of their schematics. In addition it provides support if you want to use the board as a HAT and offload GPIO work from the raspi to the pyboard or if you just want to play around with HAT's.

I know that not all of the pyboards pin are available externally. It's a tradeoff to time/complexity of the layout.

I haven't sent the files yet for production, but will do so by mid of next week - I hope! Feedback is still appreciated ;)

-Martin

Turbinenreiter
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Re: Raspberry HAT <-> Pyboard adapter

Post by Turbinenreiter » Mon Jan 18, 2016 9:29 am

I want one!

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marfis
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Re: Raspberry HAT <-> Pyboard adapter

Post by marfis » Tue Jan 19, 2016 7:00 pm

@Turbinenreiter: Sure! I'll have them manufactured at OSH park as a shared project, so you can order the raw PCBs directly there once I've placed the order. They ship 3 units per order and it will cost around 50$, so around 16$ per board.

However you should wait until I've received my boards as it may contain bugs...

I can't provide fully manufactured boards.

As for soldering, I think for the basic functionality (adapter) there should be no problem.

Turbinenreiter
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Re: Raspberry HAT <-> Pyboard adapter

Post by Turbinenreiter » Tue Jan 19, 2016 7:31 pm

After you tested the design, maybe we can ask around if people are interested and then pool together for the PCBs.

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marfis
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Re: Raspberry HAT <-> Pyboard adapter

Post by marfis » Sun Feb 07, 2016 5:36 pm

I received my boards last week and spent some time this weekend to make it work.

You can follow me on my repository https://github.com/hoihu/projects/tree/master/raspi-hat where I also placed some pics together with a writeup of what the board is capable of.

I tested it with the SenseHAT (a capable addon board that was launched to the ISS - Google AstroPi). It has lots of sensors.. humidity, temperature, pressure, gyro as well as a 8x8 RGB matrix and joystick

See here for an example:
pcbhat2.jpg
pcbhat2.jpg (92.36 KiB) Viewed 5899 times
With little effort I was able to readout the EEPROM ID and made a parser for the ATOM structure used. I was also able to control the LED matrix, readout temperature, pressure and the joystick state. I did not yet try to readout the gyro.

But as a summary it seems as the basic functionality is there :)

And a prove how effective micropython is. It was really fun to use.

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dhylands
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Re: Raspberry HAT <-> Pyboard adapter

Post by dhylands » Mon Feb 08, 2016 1:00 am

Cool - Did you order from OSH Park?

I'd like to order some.

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marfis
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Re: Raspberry HAT <-> Pyboard adapter

Post by marfis » Mon Feb 08, 2016 6:56 am

Yes its OSH park. The order link is on the readme.mk file (see link above) at the bottom. its a shared project so it should be no problem to order.

its 54$ for 3 boards, so app 18$ per piece... because its a 4 layer board its twice as expensive as a 2 layer board. Maybe that could be optimized.

I ordered the components (headers) from adafruit.

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