Leon ANAVI has been learning KiCad open source EDA suite in his spare time, and developed several Raspberry Pi (p)HAT add-on boards such as ANAVI pHAT Light to control LED RGB strips, or ANAVI Infrared pHAT to handle IR signals. All his boards are open source hardware, and come with source code, and decent documentation as explained in the two aforelinked reviews.
Leon has now come with another variant of his open source hardware certified add-on boards with ANAVI Play pHAT designed for playing games on the Raspberry Pi 3 / Pi Zero W boards, or other boards with a 40-pin header, thanks to 8 buttons, and just like his previous designs, three I2C headers are also included to connect sensors.
Key specifications and features of the board:
- Gamepad with eight buttons for playing retro games
- 3x I2C header for sensors
- EEPROM with device tree binary overlay
- OSHW Certification – UID BG000007
- Compatible with any RPi board equipped with 40-pin header
The add-on board works out of the box with Raspbian, and is fully compatible with RetroPie. You’ll find the hardware design files, documentation, and source code sample in Github. The following I2C sensors are supported in sample code: HTU21D sensor for temperature and humidity, BMP180 sensor for temperature and barometric pressure, BH1750 sensor for light, and APDS-9960 sensor for RGB color and gesture detection. But you can obviously add your own as long as you’re ready to implement software for it.
The board launched on Crowdsupply a few days ago with a symbolic $1 funding target. Rewards start at $12 for the maker kit where you’d need to solder the components yourself, but if you’d prefer something pre-assembled then the $16 ANAVI Play pHAT reward is for you. Various kits are also offered with acrylic case, I2C sensors, and/or multiple pHATs. Shipping is free worldwide, and delivery is planned for end of October, beginning of November depending on selected reward.
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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