Sensors

The MagPi, Issue 33

Leave a comment

The MagPi Issue 33This month’s The MagPi, the official magazine of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, includes two of my reviews: the GrovePi+ Starter Kit and the PiBorg UltraBorg.

The GrovePi+ Starter Kit was kindly provided by the US-based Dexter Industries, which developed the bundle with Chinese electronics experts Seeed Studios. As the name suggests, the GrovePi+ is a Raspberry Pi add-on designed to introduce compatibility with Seeed’s Grove platform of add-on modules. The main part of the system is an add-on board – not a Hardware Attached on Top (HAT)-standard board, but a ‘dumb’ piggyback board – which adds the quick-connect headers required for Grove compatibility.

Installation is easy – a script is provided by Dexter – and the bundle includes a number of Grove modules for experimentation, from LEDs and a rotary angle sensor to an ultrasonic distance sensor and a liquid-crystal display with RGB backlight. Naturally, any other Grove-compatible modules can be added if you need to expand from the stock bundle.

Where the GrovePi+ is a kit aimed at beginners who have no real project in mind, the UltraBorg is very specific in its target market: people looking to build robots. Supplied by UK-based PiBorg, the UltraBorg is an I²C device which offers high-precision 16-bit control of servos or stepper motors, alongside four interfaces for HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensors – the same popular sensor type found in the GrovePi+ kit.

For a basic robot project, the UltraBorg can be connected to a Raspberry Pi, Arduino, or any other device which speaks I²C; for more complex projects UltraBorgs can be daisy-chained for a near-unlimited number of inputs and outputs, although I was sadly unable to test this particular function during my review.

If you’re wondering what my opinions were on both these add-ons, you can download The MagPi Issue 33 for free from the The MagPi: Issue 33.

Custom PC, Issue 135

Leave a comment

Custom PC Issue 135There’s no tutorial in this month’s Hobby Tech, for one simple reason: the only interesting thing I built this month is actually from a kit, and more suited to a review-format write-up. As a result, you’ll find in the pages of Custom PC Issue 135 a two-page review of the Pi2Go-Lite robot kit, a spread on my visit to the Wuthering Bytes festival in Hebden Bridge, and a review of the surprisingly powerful CuBox-i4Pro.

Starting with the robot, Gareth Davies of UK-based educational electronics concern 4tronix was kind enough to send me an early sample of a Raspberry Pi-powered robotics kit he has put together. Dubbed the Pi2Go-Lite, it’s a cost-reduced solder-it-yourself version of a more feature-filled and pre-assembled Pi2Go design. Despite this, it’s hardly lacking in features: as well as a pair of motors driving wheels with rubber tyres and a metal 360-degree bearing caster at the front, the robot includes numerous sensors including infra-red for line-following and impact warnings and ultrasonic for distance measuring.

The kit was a delight to build, being mostly through-hole components with a small introduction to surface-mount soldering in order to – rather cleverly, in my opinion – mount standard through-hole infra-red sensors on the front edge of the main circuit board. The robot itself is driven from the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO header – Pi not supplied – which is in turn driven by a set of AA batteries. I had great fun with the build, and I’d recommend checking out the review if you fancy a bit of Python-powered robotics yourself.

Wuthering Bytes, as those who follow me on Twitter – or, indeed, in real life – will know, is a maker-themed technology event in Hebden Bridge each year. As with last year’s event, I was invited by co-founder Andrew Back to compère the Friday’s formal talk sessions and then used that to guilt the team into letting me attend the Saturday talks and Sunday workshops for free. Personal highlights of the event included a talk by Sophie Wilson, co-inventor of the ARM processor architecture, on the future of semiconductors and some excellent hands-on workshops on the Sunday – and I’m already looking forward to Wuthering Bytes 2015.

Finally, the CuBox-i4Pro. Kindly supplied by the lovely Jason King at low-power computing specialist New IT, SolidRun’s latest revision of the ultra-compact CuBox concept features an amazingly powerful quad-core Freescale i.MX6 processor. It’s the quad-core variant, in fact, of the chip you’ll find in the HummingBoard I reviewed last month, with SolidRun having worked to ensure software written for one can be used on the other.

For all this, plus various things written by people who aren’t me, you’ll want to either venture to your local newsagent or supermarket or stay in and download a digital copy of Custom PC Issue 135 via Zinio or similar services.