Kickstarter at 43% on Day 2! Really Useful Breakout Boards
This new kickstarter is “Really, Really Useful Breakout Boards – Arduino/Raspberry Pi” and is located here:
www.kickstarter.com/projects/sunair/really-really-useful-breakout-boards-arduino-raspb
The Kickstarter contains two boards that are useful in Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects for robots, power supplies, solar powered systems and more. These boards are an inexpensive I2C 8 GPIO Extender and a Quad Power Management I2C Board.
Today we will focus on the smaller of the two boards.
I2C 8 GPIO Extender – Adds 8 GPIO pins to your device through an inexpensive I2C Breakout Board
This a fabulous little board. If you need some more GPIO pins or interrupts in your current project, this is the way to do that. It interfaces with both the Raspberry Pi and Arduino microcomputers.
features:
- I2C controlled
- 8 GPIO pins
- All pins can interrupt the computer
- Two bank power supply allows two banks of 4 GPIO pins to have 5V or 3.3V
- Can program GPIO pins to make up to 3 pin logic gates (PLD)
- Software drivers for Arduino and Raspberry Pi Included!
Testing
The test jig for the I2C GPIO board was pretty easy to build. We used an Arduino and wrote the drivers. Then we checked out each of the GPIO pin and tested the options. Once we got the software working (the big glitch was the SX1502 that we use in this board uses a “1” to indicate a pin is an input, rather than a “0” like everybody else does – silly us. Read the spec!!! – amazing the odd behavior we saw when those bits are reversed!) the checkout proceeded easily.
Status of the Board
The I2C 8 GPIO Extender has been fully tested and will be released to manufacturing early next week. We will, to a very high degree of confidence, be able to make the ship dates given in the Kickstarter. The Arduino drivers are written and are into QA. We are starting on the Python Raspberry Pi drivers next week.