Ninja Pi Crust Let You Connect Arduino Shields to the Raspberry Pi

There are quite a few projects using both the Raspberry Pi and an Arduino board and its shields together. These are working but the cabling may get messy. People have already found solutions to plug Arduino shields into the Raspberry Pi with products such as Cooking Hacks’ Raspberry Pi to Arduino shield connection bridge (40 Euros) or Open Electronics’ Raspberry Pi bridge (22.50 Euros). Those two boards are fine, but do not include an Atmel MCU, and use Raspberry Pi GPIOs directly, except for their ADC. Another solution is the Paperduino Pi, a DIY Arduino board that can be plugged on top of the Raspberry Pi, and compatible with Arduino shields. But if you want an Arduino board that can easily be stacked between the Raspberry Pi, and Raspberry shield, the upcoming Ninja Pi Crust by Ninjablocks may be an interesting option, especially if you plan to use the 433MHz RF transceiver included in the board.

Beside Arduino shields compatibility, here are the key features of the board:

• ATmega328 microcontroller @ 16Mhz
• Input voltage – 5V
• 32k Flash Memory
• 3 RGB LEDs (2 with PWM)
• 433Mhz Transceiver

Tutorials for the board and how to use it with the Raspberry Pi have already been written, and Ninja Pi Crust is open source hardware which means design files are publicly available.

In case you wonder why they added an 433MHz receiver, Ninja blocks is an IoT / home automation platform that aims to ease building web & mobile apps that talk to hardware. So the receiver is used to gather data from wireless sensors, or control wireless sockets which are part of the Ninja platform.

You can more information and/or purchase the board for $49 on Ninja Crust Pi page. The board is not available immediatly, but will ship in a few weeks.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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