Back in May 2014, I was privileged to get hold of a beta version of the RasPiO Duino. It’s a GPIO plug-in accessory that has an onboard ATMega chip that allows you to bring the additional power of an Arduino to the Raspberry Pi. Here’s what I said about it back then.

It’s been a long road for its creator, Alex Eames from RasPi.TV, but now he has launched the Duino onto Kickstarter. The campaign runs from today until 3rd March.

The RasPiO Duino has the following features (taken from the Kickstarter page):

• Has a capable microcontroller: ATMEGA328P. 32KB flash. 20MHz
• 6 analog inputs for reading sensors (light, temperature, pressure etc.)
• 14 digital input/output pins for controlling and switching things
• 6 PWM outputs for variable LED brightness or motor speed control
• Can control up to 12 servos
• Can exchange the microcontroller as it is socketed
• Fits on the GPIO header and is programmed directly from a Raspberry Pi
• Uses the Arduino Integrated Development Environment for programming
• Is very keenly priced at £9 (plus postage) if you’re quick enough

Alex is planning lots of documentation and videos for the board so you can get the most out of it. He runs RasPi.TV so you know the docs and vids are going to be excellent quality and very informative.

I was very impressed by the Duino when I had a play with it – it’s a great way to use your Pi to do something extra and to expand its capabilities. The soldering required to put the kit together isn’t arduous – there’s a quite a lot of it, but the board is so well laid-out that it’s simple to do – and it’s a real pleasure to use something that has been so well-designed and thought-out.

I have just backed the Duino Kickstarter to get the latest version of the board, and I really recommend doing so – it’s extremely good value for money considering what you can do with it.

You can get hold of a RasPiO Duino board for £9 (plus a small delivery cost) if you hurry and get an Earlybird, and it goes up by a couple of pounds thereafter. Go to the Kickstarter page here. If you’d like to find out more about the board before heading to Kickstarter, take a look at the video below which explains things better than I can 🙂