New Boards Coming!
We’ve Just ordered the next revision (rev 1.0D) of the Sleepy Pi board which will hopefully be the board that is sent out to our Beta testers in a couple of weeks (barring any disasters).
There have been a number of changes from the initial rev. 1.0C board. Apart from fixing the usual crop of mistakes that seem to always appear in first prototypes, real use has thrown up a few enhancements. The major changes and key points to note are:
Expansion Headers
The Expansion Headers have been further rationalised and numbered as per Arduino. Some of the ATMEGA328’s I/O are used with handshaking to the Raspberry Pi, so not all of the “standard” Arduino pins are available. We’ve tried to prioritise the type of pins to those that are not available to the Raspberry Pi. For example, the expansion headers have: 5 PWM and 5 Analogue inputs together with the regular digital I/O pins.
During the design of the board we looked at providing “Standard” Arduino headers so that existing shields could be plugged into the board. However, a number of the normal pins are in use as either handshake lines to the Raspberry Pi or are used for power management. After much pin juggling and shield compatibility matrices, we came up with a half-way house solution. The key factor is that the Sleepy Pi is an add-on board to enhance the Raspberry Pi and NOT an add-on Arduino board. So as mentioned above, the pins that would enhance the Raspberry Pi took priority.
Arduino Shield Adapter
There are certain shields, however, that would really enhance the Sleepy Pi and open up a number of exciting use cases (yes Arduino GSM Shield, I’m talking to you here!). So therefore, there will be a plug-in Arduino Shield Adapter along with a matrix for compatibility. It won’t allow you to use every Arduino Shield, but will support some and with the use of jumpers and a bit of creativity may allow support to be added to others along the way.
Blinky LED
OK, we had to do it. My personal fixation with LED’s was suffering so I added in the standard Arduino LED so everyone’s first “Blinky” sketch with run out of the box.
To program the Arduino you run the Arduino IDE on the Raspberry Pi, select “Sleepy Pi” as your target board and download straight to the Sleepy Pi over the Raspberry Pi GPIO serial link – it really couldn’t be simpler.
Beta Testers
If you still haven’t signed up as a beta tester then please take the time to drop your details and ideas on the form below. We’re looking for anyone with a great use for the Sleepy Pi. If you are selected, then we’ll send you one of the next batch of boards to test absolutely free! All we ask is that you take the time to test it and give us any feedback, positive… or negative!
[contact_form email=”jon.watkins@spellfoundry.com” subject=”Sleepy PI Enquiry”]