The folks at Adafruit are busy as a bee working on bringing some of their really cool boards to the Raspberry Pi platform. Here’s a few that came in over the last few days:
16 servos is almost too many
Servos require a PWM output but the Raspi only has hardware support for PWM on a single GPIO pin; certainly not enough to build a gigantic, city-leveling robot. [Kevin] over at Adafruit put together a tutorial for using this 16 channel servo driver with the Raspi.
12 bit DAC
With only one PWM pin and no analog out, it was only a matter of time before someone hooked up the Adafruit 12 bit DAC to the Raspberry Pi.
16×2 LCD displays
Both the servo and DAC builds use the Adafruit I2C library and a bit of Python. Of course it’s possible to treat the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi as digital outs, just as [Mikey] did with his Raspi LCD display tutorial.
So, what distro are you using?
Of course all these builds use Adafruit’s Occidentalis distro, a maker-friendly Linux distro we’ve posted about before. It’s too useful to languish as a single Hackaday post, so here it is again.
I’m waiting to see the rpi running LinuxCNC and interfaced to something like the G540.
The real beauty of the Raspberry Pi is you don’t even need any extra hardware to do all sorts of cool things. We already have a full-featured Asterisk PBX running on the RPi complete with Google Voice for free calling throughout the U.S. and Canada as well as free worldwide calling through iNum access points. http://nerd.bz/QTtlIB
You can take it for a spin by calling 1-843-284-6844.
With a little luck, we’ll have the complete writeup on Nerd Vittles later next week.
why not just get an I2C LCD?
The 4/8 bit “Hitatchi” LCDs are fairly standard. Any random LCD you see on a website that’s serial or I2C is *usually* just one of these LCDs with a $20 “backpack” circuit on it, that just contains an AVR or a PIC and converting the digital to serial, etc…