RasPiComm – a Raspberry Pi piggyback board 1/2 by Daniel Amesberger.
After finding out about the GPIO header of the Raspberry Pi it was inevitable to build some kind of extension board for it. I was working with Arduino, Netduino and FEZ Boards in the past and they all are quite expensive compared to their capabilities and not really stable, especially when it comes to Ethernet communication. The Raspberry Pi seemed to be a perfect alternative for complex applications and easy development. Of course it is an application processor not a microprocessor, so they are not quite comparable but nevertheless a great platform for a very decent price. I want to thank the Raspberry Pi team for bringing out this awsome piece of hardware!
After checking out the available documentation I built the first version of the extension board. Even though it was working as intended I wanted to get rid of some limitations so I built v2 which is slightly different. I will write a seperate blogpost about the technical details, here I just want to share the basic concept and capabilities.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry PI.