DIGIO-128 Board Adds 128 GPIOs to Your Development Board

If you run out of GPIOs on your board, the easy way is to add an I2C GPIO expander, but those are normally limited to 8 or 16-channels, so  Land Boards decided to create a board with 8 IO expanders making it a 128 channel IO expander that works on Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, Arduino, and basically any boards with an I2C hardware or software implementation. DIGIO-128 board specifications: 8x Microchip MCP23017 16-bit I/O expander for up to 128 GPIOs Communication Interface – I2C host interface with 100/400 KHZ operation; 4-pin host interface connector (Ground, Power, Clock, Data) 8x 20-pin 2.54mm pitch connectors with 16 I/Os, 2x VCC, and 2 ground 2x 4-pin interrupt connectors Data Storage – Microchip 24LC024 2K EEPROM with board info. 3.3V or 5V operation Dimensions – 95 x 95 mm You can find out to use the board in the Wiki for code for Raspberry […]

Status of Orange Pi Boards GPIO Support

Yesterday, one person asked me to make a video showing GPIO control on Orange Pi 2 mini on YouTube, and since I have just completed a post about Orange Pi camera, I thought it might be fun to check GPIO support too. This post focuses on Allwinner H3 boards, but the instructions and status should be very similar for Allwinner A20 and A31s versions. One of the first things you want before starting playing with GPIOs is the expansion header’s pinout chart, and I could not find any until I had the idea to check for schematics, which are available on Orange Pi resources page. I downloaded the schematics for Orange Pi 2, which should be the same as for Orange Pi 2 mini as the only difference is the lack of WiFi module. Orange Pi PC is a little different, and the schematics are nowhere to be found, but […]

Add GPIOs to Windows, Linux, Android Computers and Devices with FTDI USB Adapters / Breakout Boards

It’s possible to to add GPIOs to your computer, (openWRT) router, or Android tablet using some FTDI USB dongles that expose I/Os. On operating systems based on Linux, including Android, you can use the GPIO sysfs interface (/sys/class/gpio) to easily control GPIOs from the command line, and in some cases Rx, Tx, CTS, .. pins can also be used as GPIOs. Zoobab has tried it with various FTDI USB adapters, and Oneping OP-1010 breakout board based on PL2303 HDX chip, and the results are mixed, but it could worth a try. There are currently patchsets ([1] and [2]) awaiting acceptance to mainline kernel that will enable GPIO support for these USB devices, but in the meantime you need to patch the kernel yourself, and then enable the relevant options in the kernel config for example “USB_SERIAL_PL2303_GPIO” or “USB_SERIAL_FTDI_SIO_GPIO”. The first patch is for PL2303 chips, and the second for FT2xxx/FT4xxx […]

EmbeddedTS embedded systems design