Raspberry Pi Field Unit (RPFU) #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_pi
Thanks to Jay for sending in his great project! Nice work! Read more about it here.
Find me on Twitter at @jaydoscher or follow the Raspberry Pi field unit below at @fieldunit. I’d like to thank Adafruit and Big Blue Saw- their help with this project has been phenomenal! There was a ton of learning that went into the project, and their tools are awesome.
I’ve been working hard on a project that allows me to take a Raspberry Pi 2 into the wild outdoors. While there are many cases out there that work fine in a cabinet or on a desk, I couldn’t find one that would work outdoors. I became familiar with weatherproof enclosures when I started tinkering with my Solarbot a couple years ago, but I needed more than a small plastic box this time. This time around I wanted something that would support my Solar Robot 7 (which is live on Twitter here), a Raspberry Pi 2- powered solar tracker. More on that soon!
As with any technical project, I’ll break the project down into several categories:
HDMI 4 Pi – 10.1″ Display 1280×800 IPS – HDMI/VGA/NTSC/PAL: Yes, this is a beautiful bright 10.1″ TFT display with incredibly high resolution and great angle-visibility! We tried to get the thinnest, brightest, highest resolution display that would be good for embedded computing usage. The visible display measures 10″ diagonal and is a ‘raw’ display as is used in a tablet, ultra thin with some mounting tabs around the edge. We include a driver board with HDMI, VGA and Composite inputs. The display is very easy to use – simply connect a 9-12VDC adapter to the 2.1mm center-positive DC jack, then connect a digital video source to one of the ports. Voila, a display! Read more.
To kick off the Adafruit HAT party, we have this Perma-Proto inspired plug in daughter board. It has a grid of 0.1″ prototyping soldering holes for attaching chips, resistors, LED, potentiometers and more. The holes are connected underneath with traces to mimic the solderless breadboards you’re familiar. There’s also long power strips for +3V, +5V and Ground connections to the Pi. Near the top we break out nearly every pin you could want to connect to the Pi (#26 didnt quite make the cut). Read more.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!