Not Quite Building A Raspi Arduino Bridge

August 5, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

A few months ago, [Omer] sent in a Raspberry Pi to Arduino bridge he’s been working on called Ponte. Now that he’s gotten a few assembled, he can actually test out his ideas for combining the powerful Raspi with the ubiquitous Arduino.

Ponte revision 0 used a pair of 12-bit analog to digital converters, but during the soldering and debugging phase of development [Omer] discovered a few things were wrong with his original design. The FETs on the fabricated boards had the drain and source pins mixed up, but that problem was easily solved with a bit of board surgery.

The worst problem was the mechanical design of Ponte rev. 0 – the power jack on the Ponte is directly above the Raspi’s USB port, meaning it’s impossible to plug the Ponte into the Pi.

[Omer] is working on these problems and should have the revised boards completed shortly. A few people have asked where they can get a Ponte, but right now there are no plans to assemble and ship boards. That may change, but for now if might be worth bugging [Omer] to put his new and improved Ponte (with an 8-port I2C port expander!) up on SeeedStudio

Using Arduino Shields With The Raspberry Pi

May 6, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

Since the Arduino was launched years ago, many ‘shields’ or add-on boards providing additional functionality have been released. There are hundreds of different shields, from video capture shields to touch screen shields. Now that the Raspberry Pi is out in the wild, it was only a matter of time before a RasPi to Arduino shield bridge was created.

[Omer] calls his bridge ‘Ponte’ and it allows Arduino shields to be used with the incredible horsepower of an embedded Linux system. While [Omer] originally expected to write the RasPi to Arduino software converter himself, but found WiringPi halfway through the build. Of course this build comes just a day after we saw a tutorial on controlling the GPIO pins on the RasPi, and we expect to see similar GPIO-hacking builds in the future.

Right now, the Ponte only supports Arduino Uno-sized shield, so the possibility of an all-in-one RepRap controller using the RAMPS motor driver is impossible for now. We expect that to change very quickly as more people get their RasPis delivered.