Dawn Robotics have created a new board for the Pi. It’s actually been out since January but they’ve just started to market the product, and what a product it is. In fact, if you’ve ever wanted to explore the world of Arduino and connecting one to the Pi, you’re probably not going to find a simpler way of doing it.

It’s a GPIO plug-in board that houses an ATmega328p chip and a load of female headers. They’ve added the Arduino Uno bootloader to make it easy to program. The Pi communicates with the chip over UART (serial) and you can use a library called pyMata to control the analog inputs and digital inputs and outputs. You can read some summarised information about the board, including how to use it, on their blog here and you can read a full manual for it here. The board includes 8 analog inputs and it’s the easiest, most compact solution I’ve seen for reading analog sensors.

The board comes to just under £19 delivered which makes it cheaper than most, if not all, similar Arduino solutions available (such as the Gertboard and the Gertduino).

You can buy a Pi Co-Op here.

Here’s a video: