If you have several Arduino shields, you can use them on your Raspberry Pi B+/ Pi 2 board with Cooking Hacks’ Raspberry Pi to Arduino shields connection bridge supported by arduPi library to control I2C, SPI, GPIO, analog inputs, etc.., and sells for $65 on Amazon. Seeed Studio Grove modules have also become more popular, with several new boards integrating 4-pin Grove connectors such as Beaglebone Green. Raspberry Pi boards also support Grove modules, up to 15 of these!, using Grove Pi+ add-on board which the company sells for around $30. But I’ve just discovered a Raspberry Pi to Arduino Expansion Board V2.0 on DealExtreme, selling for $7.97 that’s allows the latest Raspberry Pi boards with a 40-pin headers to take both Arduino shields and 2 Grove modules. After some investigations, I found out it was made by ITead Studio, where they sell it for $5 + shipping. The Wiki […]
How to Use Nextion Serial Touchscreen Displays – Part 1: Standalone Mode
Itead Studio launched an Indiegogo campaign earlier this year for their Nextion TFT displays that can be connected to external board such as Arduino or Raspberry Pi via the serial interface, or even a standard computer provided you have a USB to TTL debug board. The campaign was successful with over 1,700 backers, and the company recently sent me two samples for review: a 2.4″ display and a 5″ display. In this post, I’ll look at the boards, and make a small standalone demo with Nextion Editor in Windows. Nextion NX3224T024 2.4″ Display The first item is a 2.4″ TFT display called NX3224T024_011N (non-touch) or NX3224T024_011R (Resistive touch) with 65536 color, 320×240 pixel resolution, LED backlight and up to 200nit brightness. It ships with a cable for the serial connection (5V, Tx, Rx, and GND). The back of the display features the serial connector, a micro SD used to load the […]
Flip & Click Board with Atmel SAM3X8E MCU Features 4 mikroBUS Sockets & Arduino Headers
HummingBoard Gate introduced last month was the first board I saw with a mikroBUS socket that can be used with over 150 “Click boards” by MikroElektronika adding functionalities such as sensors, OLED displays, relays, servos, and so on. But if you project don’t quite need the power of a full featured Linux board, or you simply prefer working with the Arduino IDE, MikroElektronika has just launched Flip & Click board powered by an Atmel SAM3X8E Cortex-M3 micro-controller and featuring four mikroBUS sockets on the back of the board, as well as Arduino compatible headers on the top. Flip & Click board specifications: MCU – Atmel AT91SAM3X8E Cortex M3 micro-controller @ 84MHz with 512 KB flash, 100 KB SRAM (64+32+4), also used in Arduino Due. Expansions Headers Arduino UNO compatible headers on the top 4x mikroBUS socket on the bottom USB – micro USB port for programming and power Misc – […]
$9 ESP8266 D1 Board Features Arduino UNO Headers
We’ve already seen the Arduino IDE supports ESP8266(-EX) WiFi SoC, and some companies have designed Arduino shields for ESP8266 modules, but so far I had never seen an ESP8266 board with Arduino UNO form factor supporting Arduino shields, and that’s exactly what showed up in DX new arrivals RSS feed with a white label ESP-12E UNO board selling for $11.75 including shipping. The “D1” board has the following specifications: ESP8622 Module – AI-Thinker ESP12-E module (as found in NodeMCU) based on ESP8266-EX SoC @ 80 or 160 MHz with 4MB flash Connectivity – 802.11 b/g/n with PCB antenna. Supports station / softAP / SoftAP + station modes, WPA/WPA2 security. I/Os 11x Digital I/O pins 1x Analog Input pin I/O logic level: 3.3V ADC pin (A0) input voltage: 0-3.3V Debugging – Via micro USB using CH340G USB-TTL serial chip Misc – Reset button Power Supply – 6-24VDC via DC jack, 5V via […]
Arduino 101 Board Features Intel Curie Module, Bluetooth LE, and Sensors
I’ve recently learned that the battle between the two Arduino teams, namely Arduino SRL (arduino.org) in Italy, and Arduino LLC (arduino.cc) in the US, had taken another turn with Arduino LLC now branding their boards as Arduino in the US, and Genuino in the rest of the world. This may certainly bring confusion to new comers, especially as they have to deal with different version of the Arduino IDE. With that backdrop, Arduino LLC has now introduced Arduino 101 (aka Genuino 101) board powered by Intel Curie module with Quark SE x86 SoC with Bluetooth LE and a 6-axis combo sensor. Arduino 101 specifications: SoC – Intel Curie compute module including an Intel Quark SE x86 32-bit microcontroller @ 32 MHz and an a DSP sensor hub @ 32Mhz with 384 KB flash, 80 KB SRAM (24KB available for sketches), , Bluetooth LE, and 6-axis combo sensor with accelerometer and […]
Marvell EZ-Connect MW302 IoT Starter Kit Supports AWS IoT Cloud Services
Amazon has just launched AWS (Amazon Web Services) IoT (Beta), a cloud platform that lets connected devices securely interact with cloud applications and other IoT devices. As pasrt of the announcement, they also released AWS IoT SDK that comes in three flavors: Embedded C SDK for C-based platforms such as Linux, RTOS, with variants for OpenSSL and mbed TLS. JavaScript SDK in Node.js Arduino Yún SDK. Ten started kits are currently officially supported by AWT IoT, many of them being existing platforms such as LinkIt One, BeagleBone Green, Intel Edison, or TI LaunchPad CC3200, with several of these kits including SeeedStudio’s Grove modules. One of the kits that’s completely new, at least to me, is Marvell EZ-Connect MW302 IoT Starter Kit which include a mini USB to USB cable, and Marvell 88MW302 development board with the following (preliminary) specifications: SoC – Marvell EZ-Connect MW302 ARM Cortex-M4 WiSoC with 512KB SRAM […]
Snickerdoodle Xilinx Zynq ARM + FPGA Board Starts at $55 (Crowdfunding)
While Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ARMv8 + FPGA SoC is still in development, there are already quite a few Xilinx Zynq-7000 boards on the market today. The cheapest I know of is MYirTech Z-Turn board selling for $99, but krtkl (pronounced “critical“), US a based startup, will soon bring an even cheaper Zynq-7010/7020 board with their Snickerdoodle board currently listed on CrowdSupply platform for $55 and up, plus shipping. Snickerdoodle board specifications: SoC Xilinx Zynq-7010 dual core Cortex A9 processor @ 667 MHz + FPGA with 430K gates or Xilinx Zynq-7020 dual core Cortex A9 processor @ 866 MHz + FPGA with 1.3million gates (~430K ASIC gates) System Memory – 512MB or 1GB LPDDR2-800 Storage – micro SD card slot, 16MB boot flash Connectivity via Ti Wilink 8 solution 2.4GHz 802.11 b/g/n WiFi + Bluetooth 4.0 or Dual band 802.11 b/g/n WiFi (2×2 MIMO) + Bluetooth 4.0 USB – 1x micro USB port […]
ZeroPi is an Arduino & Raspberry Pi Compatible Motor Control Board (Crowdfunding)
Pi boards keep on coming… As soon as I finished writing about Roseapple Pi board, yet another one popped out on my twitter feed… But that one is of a different kind, as it won’t run Linux, but instead the board is powered by an Atmel SAMD21 Cortex M0+ micro-controller, and can support lots of electric motors including up to 11 micro servos and 8 DC motors – or 4 stepper motors – simultaneously. ZeroPi board specifications: MCU – Atmel SAMD21J18 ARM Cortex M0+ @ 48 MHz with 32 SRAM and 256KB flash I/O pins via 33-pin header, 4-pin temperature sensor, and 10-pin Raspberry Pi header 35 GPIOs 4x 12-bit ADC channels 1x 10-bit DAC 2x UART 2-channel temperature sensor interface DC current per I/O pin- 7mA DC / Stepper Motor control – 4x 4-channel SLOT interface compatible with common parts such as DRV8825 or A4988 Stepper motor driver and […]