Accessories, Crowdfunding, Robotics

Powerful stepper motor board for the Raspberry Pi

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The guys at Canadian company Roboteurs are currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund their new stepper motor driver board – the SlushEngine. It looks like a stunning piece of kit and has the following features:

  • Controls up to 4 bi-polar stepper motors
  • Max 7A / motor
  • 9-35 V DC operating range
  • 1-128 microstepping capabilities
  • Integrated motion engine in stepper driver
  • 4 limit switch inputs
  • 4 general purpose industrial inputs
  • 4 general purpose industrial outputs (3A / 24V)
  • 8 additional logic level I/O
  • Thermistor temperature sensing
  • UEXT expansion connector
  • Raspberry Pi fused power source

It’s compatible with the B+, Pi 2 and A+ and looks like it could be a lot of fun to use, especially for projects where you absolutely, positively have to use powerful stepper motors – 7A per motor will certainly go a long way! The board comes with a simple-to-use Python library which lets you start up a motor with just three lines of Python. It’s great to see a company get the software right in addition to the hardware. It will also be completely open source, which is good to see.

The board is currently available to Earlybirds at $190 (Canadian Dollars) plus delivery, which works out at approximately £125 delivered. It’s quite expensive, but for those of you who have a specific application it could well be the board you’ve been looking for. Large power-hungry projects will certainly benefit from the engineering on display here. There’s also an $80 (£67-ish delivered) version to drive one stepper motor.

Take a look at the Kickstarter here if you’d like to find out more.

Crowdfunding, Education, GPIO boards, Making, Programming, Sensors

Build your own digital clock with a Raspberry Pi with this Kickstarter

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David Saul is running a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new add-on board for the Raspberry Pi. Compatible with the B+, A+ and Pi 2, the PiMuxClock plugs into the 40-way GPIO header and stands up, giving you a large digital clock display. Also attached (on the enhanced version) is a temperature sensor (just because there was room on the board) and on the back is a mount point for an Adafruit real-time clock board, which means that internet connectivity is not required once the time has been set. There are various pledging options available, depending on how much you’d like to learn from and do with the kit. There are also pre-built options available if you can’t face the soldering (although this is a great kit to start with if you want to learn!)

Take a look and back the Kickstarter here.

Networking, Software, Tutorials

Big Data on the Raspberry Pi 2

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Newcastle-based Darren has written a tutorial that covers installing Apache Spark on the Raspberry Pi. Spark is a Scala library that is used for the analysis of so-called “big data”. This is the first in a series of posts and his next will deal with setting up a cluster of Pi 2s to do fast, distributed analysis. As he points out, it has to be the Pi 2 due to the increased memory and multiple cores, and it is limited by the specs of the machine such as the comparatively low throughput of the network interface. Read more here.

Software, Tutorials

Limit SD Card writes on Rasberry Pi using Ramlog

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It’s well-established that SD cards have a finite lifespan. This lifespan is dependent on the number of writes that you do to the card (although the number of reads is largely irrelevant). Alexander van der Sar has blogged about using a piece of software called Ramlog. At boot time, the current logs are read into memory, then subsequent log writes are done directly to RAM, therefore not using the SD card. The logs are then written at shutdown time to the SD card, thus minimising the number of writes. Read about this here.

Thanks to Peter Scargill who went through the pain of finding some instructions that worked!