Robotics

Robotic insects make first controlled flight

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This is nothing to do with the Raspberry Pi, but it is cool enough that I felt I had to blog about it.

A group of researchers at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have developed a flying robot that is half the size of a paperclip, weighs 80mg and flaps it’s wings 120 times per second. Watch the video to see it’s first controlled flight.

GPIO boards, Shopping

Expansion boards galore on eBay for #RaspberryPi

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I was browsing through eBay and I thought I’d share with you some of the expansion boards I’ve found for the Raspberry Pi.

First up is a 16×16 LED matrix board from Pridopia.

For £29.99 you get a board that plugs directly onto the GPIO and features 256 LEDs that you can control over the I2C bus. The board features a header which enables you to connect up another identical LED board for up to 512 LEDs. They actually produce loads of boards for the Pi, but so far they’ve not made impact on the community. You can view their products on their website here.

The next up is the Custard Pi 1. I’ve covered this on the blog before. This is a fairly simple idea – protect the Pi at all costs, or in this case £8.50 + P&P. Basically, it breaks out the GPIO pins to screw terminals and adds resistors and fuses to make sure nothing takes too much power from the pins.

SF Innovations, who produced the Custard Pi 1 also created it’s big brother, the Custard Pi 2 which features analog inputs and outputs via an analog-to-digital chip. This board is available on Amazon for £16 (which I think is very good value).

Next up, we have a sort-of board from AlienSpec that breaks out the pins from the CSI/DSI connectors on the Pi. Now, I have no idea why anyone would want to do such a thing as these connectors are purely there for the camera module and the (possible) display module. But, if low-level hacking is your thing, I guess for £5 + P&P it’s worth a punt.

Continuing our look at boards, we have the “BLiSo” – which stands for Buttons, Lights, Sounds. For £14.99 + P&P, you get a board that slots straight onto the GPIO and gives you 8 buttons, 9 LEDs and a piezo sounder (mounted under the board). This is a nicely designed board by “circuit5urgeon” and stands alongside the BerryClip as a beautiful, self-contained starters’ kit. I’d love to get hold of one of these. The only thing that does annoy me is that the seller does not say whether the board is pre-soldered or not.

Now we have the Embedded Pi by CooCox which, for £32, gives you an interface between the Pi and Arduino shields. It sounds intriguing, but the high price is because it serves other purposes as well, which may not be appropriate for Pi owners. You can read more about it here.

There are other boards on eBay, and I encourage you to look around and judge what’s right for you.