Gertboard software

2nd of April 2012 by liz

Gert has had a lot of requests from you guys for the software used in the last Gertboard video (Gertboard, for those who are new round here, is a GPIO expansion board you can use to get your Raspberry Pi to drive motors, lights, sensors and all that good stuff.)

For now, you can download the Gertboard software here – I’ll get a link added to the Downloads page too later when I’ve had a chance to think about how to structure a new category for software.

(Photo snipped: you can see Gertboard in the linked video, and WordPress is being a bit buggy and won’t allow me to display the photo any smaller than full-size.)

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I just got home and tried setting it to the local IP address (changed the *.ovpn client config file on the laptop). Still no internet connection. Then I closed and restarted the openvpn software (thinking that maybe it didn't accept…
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I did all of the things you mentioned, but I think I may have made a new line. Will check tonight. Thanks!Thanks Texy, indeed made a new line. Now it works like a charm!
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Over-clocken alleen niet.Als je de spanning omhoog zet (zo dat je een nog hogere frequentie kan halen) zal dat de levensduur verminderen.

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64 comments

Salamander on
April 2, 2012 at 11:44 am said:

Nice toy!!
Lot’s of possibilities.

Comment ↓
Ivan on
April 2, 2012 at 11:53 am said:

Where to buy that board ?

Comment ↓
- liz on
  April 2, 2012 at 11:55 am said:
  
  Gert’s having them built at the moment, which will take a few weeks. When they’re available, you’ll be able to buy them here on this website.
  
  Comment ↓
  - Stuart Lea on
    April 2, 2012 at 1:30 pm said:
    
    Is there any chance of Gert publishing the BOM/schematic before the boards are available to allow people time to source the components?
    
    Comment ↓
    - Gert on
      April 2, 2012 at 4:51 pm said:
      
      I am working on a manual which has BOM schematics etc. These things just take time I am afraid.
      
      Comment ↓
      - Sergey on
        July 24, 2012 at 7:25 pm said:
        
        Any chances to buy this board now?
ceteras on
April 2, 2012 at 11:57 am said:

This looks like the old version of Gertboard. Isn’t the new one based on an Atmega, and transistors replaced with a chip?

Comment ↓
- liz on
  April 2, 2012 at 11:58 am said:
  
  It is – I’ve marked it as such in the picture caption. (Gert hasn’t sent me a picture of rev2 yet.)
  
  Comment ↓
- Gert on
  April 2, 2012 at 4:55 pm said:
  
  My manufacturer screwed up the silkscreen mask. So I decided not to show a picture like last time. I will see if can make a decent one from a distance.
  
  Comment ↓
mrasp on
April 2, 2012 at 12:07 pm said:

I expect that there are many technical reasons that I am ignorant of, but can’t Arduino/PICAXE/etc. be used for some of the purposes that GertBoard will be used for?? After all, they already exist, and many future RPi users will already have them and be familiar with them. I suspect that there are valid reasons for this, I am just not fully up to speed with this. If this is going to be the major IO interface to things like motors etc., then many of the people who will want an RPi will also be wanting one of these, hope you can make enough (RS/Farnell???).

Comment ↓
- JamesH on
  April 2, 2012 at 12:18 pm said:
  
  Yes they could. The advantage the Gertboard has is that is was designed to I/F to the Raspi, unlike the others.
  Demand for the Gertboard is completely unknown at the moment, it’s anyone’s guess!
  
  Comment ↓
  - XAPBob on
    April 2, 2012 at 12:22 pm said:
    
    Mine won’t be for my first Pi.
    Although the ability to drive a motor, and run a couple of cameras makes for a good cycle computer. Particularly since I already have regulated (and UPS’s) USB power from my dynamo.
    
    Comment ↓
  - Brett Ginsburg on
    April 2, 2012 at 3:50 pm said:
    
    I have a project in mind that I had planned to use Rpi + Arduino for in a university laboratory setting, but would love the unification of a gertboard instead. The board will have to be priced competetively with an Arduino, though, and I think the price point is still shrouded in mystery, right?
    
    Comment ↓
    - JamesH on
      April 2, 2012 at 4:46 pm said:
      
      The PCB’s will be pretty cheap – then add only the components you actually need. Should be a very cost effective device.
      
      Comment ↓
- texy on
  April 2, 2012 at 12:21 pm said:
  
  The Gertboard is effectively an arduino based shield for the Pi.
  Note also that unless the plan has changed, it will be supplied as a bare pcb only – you fit the components you want to use in your project as you need them.
  
  Texy
  
  Comment ↓
  - NickH on
    April 3, 2012 at 3:37 pm said:
    
    Has anyone considered using “occam-pi”. The Pi in the name is purely coincidental.
    
    See the web site: http://concurrency.cc/hardware/ for details.
    As you will see from the above link an AVR version and a Linux version exist.
    
    With a “transputer link” driver running over SPI one could imagine all sorts of possibilities for hardware in the class room.
    
    If more work is needed on the Arm port I wouldn’t mind getting involved myself.
    
    Comment ↓
    - NickH on
      June 22, 2012 at 10:13 pm said:
      
      For the sake of completeness, I just noticed that it has been done now by these guys:
      
      http://concurrency.cc/2012/06/12/hackathon-occam-pi-raspberry-pi.html
      
      I for one shall look forward to playing with it when I get my hardware in a couple of months.
      
      Comment ↓
- Stuart Lea on
  April 2, 2012 at 12:30 pm said:
  
  Don’t worry, I suspect that there will be a whole raft of boards that will appear shortly after the RPis get into developers’ hands, from many different sources. I’m primarily a hardware guy, so I’m biased, but I feel that there will be a massive market for RPi interface boards, both broad appeal (I/O, A/D, D/A, Relays) and niche (inclinometers, compass, touchscreen, GPS….etc).
  
  Comment ↓
Chris Mc on
April 2, 2012 at 12:33 pm said:

When is Mr Gert sharing the bits we need to buy to populate the board?

I need to get a business plan together for my new army of pi powered minions.

Comment ↓
Jan on
April 2, 2012 at 12:37 pm said:

To save a bit of bandwidth, you should probably embed a scaled-down image in the post above and link to the large image only. Uses ~1.2MB too much per page impression (for both visitors of this post and the homepage).

Comment ↓
Oli on
April 2, 2012 at 12:40 pm said:

You should resize the image. It’s embedded at full size meaning anybody viewing this post (via the site or RSS) is downloading the full 1.4MB.

Comment ↓
- liz on
  April 2, 2012 at 12:52 pm said:
  
  Thanks – I’ve actually had to remove the pic, because I seem to be bumping up against a WordPress bug here and it won’t display the picture at any size smaller than 1.4MB!
  
  Comment ↓
  - Michael S on
    April 2, 2012 at 4:20 pm said:
    
    It’s times like those I usually just edit the html of the post directly and add in the height and width tags for the image. I’m probably wrong but doesn’t wordpress have a thumbnail thing where it’d just link a thumbnail to the large image or is that something done manually?
    
    btw, I’m looking forward to grabbing one of them gert boards to play with. Just wish they’d get them pi’s in order.
    
    Comment ↓
texy on
April 2, 2012 at 12:44 pm said:

Some simple instructions for linux newbies for compiling the code will be needed.
Also the Atmega firmware is of course required (where needed).

Texy

Comment ↓
- Chris Rowland on
  April 2, 2012 at 1:11 pm said:
  
  AIUI this doesn’t use the Atmega at all, it’s controlling the Pi GPIO pins directly.
  AFAIK the ATmega could be programmed as an Arduino, and there’s provision to control it from br Pi by fiting links in a couple of pairs of pins. It may even be possible to run the Arduino IDE on the Pi and program it from there.
  Compiling could be no more than “make makefile”. In any case this looks pretty standard and any development environment could be used. As he says Gert has tried not to do anything clever so beginners should be able to work out what’s going on.
  It’s all a work in progress of course and lots more information will become available.
  
  Comment ↓
  - texy on
    April 2, 2012 at 1:31 pm said:
    
    For the demo code supplied, the atmega isn’t used, you are right, but it gets more interesting and there are more capabilities once it is.
    As for compiling the code, it may be as easy as ‘make makefile’, but it may not. Which of the distro’s will support C++ ‘out of the box’ ?
    Texy
    
    Comment ↓
    - Greg on
      April 2, 2012 at 1:37 pm said:
      
      AVRs standard dev environment is studio5 whic includes the winavr package of GCC for AVR. as far as I know this is availabe on windows only.
      
      Greg
      
      Comment ↓
      - panik on
        April 2, 2012 at 4:00 pm said:
        
        avr-gcc, avr-libc, binutils-avr and avrdude (among other utilities) will be available in Linux on the Raspberry Pi.
    - Chris Rowland on
      April 2, 2012 at 1:58 pm said:
      
      All of them
      
      Comment ↓
      - texy on
        April 2, 2012 at 6:57 pm said:
        
        Well I couldn’t get ‘make makefile’ to work, but I did get it to compile in Geany by loading the makerfile and selecting Build, Make. Then using command prompt, and going into root, and use ./gertboard_demo to run it
        This is using the Raspberry Pi Debian distro.
        Texy
- gregd99 on
  April 3, 2012 at 1:12 am said:
  
  the bit that is missing is studio which includes a nice editor and simulator and a graphical front end for all of the tools.
  
  is there anything similar in the linux world?
  
  Greg
  
  Comment ↓
  - TuxD3v on
    April 3, 2012 at 1:13 pm said:
    
    code::blocks
    
    Comment ↓
    - gregd99 on
      April 4, 2012 at 12:25 am said:
      
      Thanks – I learn something every day.
      
      have you used studio as well. are you able to make any comparison?
      
      Greg
      
      Comment ↓
      - LittleFox on
        April 4, 2012 at 1:27 pm said:
        
        code::blocks is a very good IDE.
        The source code editor is even better than that in avr studio IMO.
        But there’s no emulator for AVR’s …
        What kind of graphical frontend do you mean? Do program the chip? You could integrate this as via a post-build step
      - gregd99 on
        April 5, 2012 at 4:07 am said:
        
        way of topic I know …. but…
        
        The front end I mean is the ide… something to drive the tools rather than doing from command line. it sounds like code::blocks does this well.
        
        any ideas on a simulator? programming a uC without a simulator is a pretty big challenge – at least for me:-)
roberto on
April 2, 2012 at 2:24 pm said:

What about the software for RaspberryPi moterboard to control devices connected by SPI and I2C? I will like to interface eeprom, sensors, ADC, etc.

Comment ↓
- Gert on
  April 2, 2012 at 4:58 pm said:
  
  The example code is already using the SPI interface to talk to the ADC and the DAC. I have not tried any I2C drivers yet.
  
  Comment ↓
  - Lars T. Hansen on
    April 3, 2012 at 3:55 am said:
    
    Gert,
    
    To my knowledge there exists not an I²C host adapter driver for the BCM 2835 (and BCM 2708).
    
    I can’t find the host adapter driver on LXR[1] or in the RPi kernel tree on GitHub[2], but searching for something specific in the kernel source tree isn’t quite so easily.
    
    I have a number a projects which include I²C, so I will create such a host device driver, if it had not been made yet.
    
    The BCM 2835 (The RPi SoC) has 3 I²C buses with 16 byte write and 16 byte read FIFOs with hardware interrupt support, so to use I²C bus speeds up to 5 MHz should be possible on all 3 buses in parallel (the I²C chips must be build to support 5 MHz speeds, obviously).
    —
    A little bit of kernel terminology for the curious:
    An I²C host adapter driver is a driver which is responsible for talking with I²C chips via an I²C bus.
    An I²C (chip) device driver talks with the I²C host adapter driver, if it will talk with a I²C chip.
    Most people will use the generic i2c-dev chip device driver to do a Linux UIO driver (a user space device driver), others will use an existing kernel space chip device driver.
    —-
    [1]: http://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v3.3.1/drivers/i2c/busses/
    [2]: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux
    
    Comment ↓
fpaliuc on
April 2, 2012 at 3:39 pm said:

Thanks a lot !!!!!

Comment ↓
Doug on
April 2, 2012 at 3:58 pm said:

You know, you could always interface an Arduino via USB on RasPi, if you want a “super brain” for your Arduino, just sayin’.

Comment ↓
- mahjongg on
  April 2, 2012 at 4:51 pm said:
  
  Interfacing an arduino through USB would probably give all kinds of latency (timing) problems, it would often be better, (and easier) to use the UART on the R-PI to connect to the Arduino’s UART.
  
  Comment ↓
  - Chris Rowland on
    April 3, 2012 at 10:01 am said:
    
    The Arduino on USB looks like a serial device and it’s possible to communicate with it as such. At least it is on the PC and I don’t think Linux would be different. The Debian armel repository has the Arduino IDE (version 0.18) I haven’t loaded it yet because there’s quite a lot and downloads using the emulator are slow.
    
    Comment ↓
Rowland on
April 3, 2012 at 2:22 am said:

Any chance we can have this code up on Github?

Comment ↓
- Gert on
  April 3, 2012 at 11:55 am said:
  
  I strongly suggest a clean up before checking this in. It is not the best code in the world. Also it has been simplified (read broken some basic programming rules) to make it more readable to novice programmers.
  Especially the mmap() usage needs a good overhaul.
  
  Comment ↓
Tom on
April 3, 2012 at 2:53 pm said:

I’m a hardware newbie, but ive been wondering this a while and cant find an answer to it…
Can the GertBoard run a servo? and if so how many?
Cheers

Comment ↓
- Darren on
  April 3, 2012 at 10:41 pm said:
  
  If the servo is a conventional motor, yes there are two connections for motors and the position sensor can be connected to one of the inputs. If however the servo is a stepper motor it will require a separate controller.
  
  Comment ↓
David on
April 3, 2012 at 4:00 pm said:

Can’t wait to get my hands on one of these. I’ve got a number of projects in mind for it.

What’s the resolution on the D/A and A/D converters?

Comment ↓
- Darren on
  April 4, 2012 at 1:19 am said:
  
  The standard ones are 8bit but there are two alternatives at 10 and 12 bit.
  
  Comment ↓
Thomas Doubty on
April 3, 2012 at 11:26 pm said:

Could Gert please give an indication of the highest performance parallel lcd display he expects the Raspberry Pi will be capable of driving vi GPIO.

eg PSP screen uses 24 bit RGB plus control signals at ~480×272 which seems to completely overwhelm the available IO. Is the best possible a COG like display operating in nibble mode to squeeze into 8 lines. ie what conclusions has he drawn on the maximum lcd spec running via GPIO.

Comment ↓
- Gert on
  April 4, 2012 at 5:01 pm said:
  
  The GPIO can’t drive a parallel LCD display. It was never build for that. Also on the Raspbery-Pi there are not enough signals. Phone manufacturers who use the BCM2835 use the DSi output with a DSI LCD display.
  
  Comment ↓
JP on
April 4, 2012 at 1:56 am said:

How about an expansion board for adding memory? Impossible?

Comment ↓
- JamesH on
  April 4, 2012 at 8:24 am said:
  
  Generally regarded as impossible.
  
  Comment ↓
- plugwash on
  April 4, 2012 at 3:56 pm said:
  
  Well you couldn’t make an expansion board that mapped extra memory directly into the address space because you don’t have any memory mapped expansion buses available to you.
  
  You could build a board with ram on it, write a driver to make it appear as a block device and then use it as swap. However the problem you will have is the lack of fast enough interfaces to make it worthwhile.
  
  Comment ↓
idali mendoza on
April 4, 2012 at 10:42 pm said:

I think everyone at this company are great and very honest giving us up to date feed back on your progress and letting us know whats going on at your site thank you I truly appreciate it #1 fan

Comment ↓
Jimmy Merrild Krag on
April 6, 2012 at 1:20 am said:

You know what would be cool? A wireless Gertboard! Then I could have media center and fish tank surveilance and automation (gertboard) in the same Raspi

Comment ↓
Digvijay on
April 14, 2012 at 12:12 pm said:

Yes! Finally someone writes about Java.

Comment ↓
Petr on
April 23, 2012 at 5:07 pm said:

Hi Gert,
I would like to know how far are the attempts about the SPI/GPIO/PWM/I2C …. drivers.
I was following your source C code and I think it is possible to rewrite/convert it to Python using Python mmap module.
Because of that, I would like to know, if there are some successful attempts to write the kernel driver and if yes, how fare the development is.

Best Regards
Petr

Comment ↓
Zen on
May 19, 2012 at 12:30 am said:

Hi,
What happened about the gertboard? When will Hero Gert put down the parts lists or tell us how are where to buy? I really want to start playin with the pi in robo world and make to move motors, turn lights orr and on.

Many Thanks,
Zen Roth

Comment ↓
- liz on
  May 19, 2012 at 12:32 am said:
  
  We’ve got an announcement about this coming up in the next week or so – things are afoot! (Under embargo at the moment, but we’ll let you know as soon as we can.)
  
  Comment ↓
  - Russell on
    May 25, 2012 at 8:35 pm said:
    
    Thanks for the updates Liz. I hope you folk are getting geared up for significant deman for Gerts board. I think a number of folk in the Hackspace community would be interested. I would sure like to tie RasPi and my Arduino.
    
    Comment ↓
  - Thomas McMichael on
    June 13, 2012 at 3:37 pm said:
    
    Any word on updates ? Almost a month since last post …
    
    Thanks
    
    Comment ↓
Roy on
July 16, 2012 at 9:11 pm said:

Hi, I heard the news about the Gertboard a while ago, but still cannot find where I can buy one. Wonder where I can buy it

Comment ↓
- stevepdp on
  July 16, 2012 at 9:56 pm said:
  
  Gert spoke on a panel at the weekend with a Gertboard update, see this video at the 05:18 mark.
  
  It’s not yet available for sale.
  
  Comment ↓
  - liz on
    July 16, 2012 at 11:03 pm said:
    
    It will be very soon, though!
    
    Comment ↓

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