On 12/01/2014 04:59 AM, Dan Egli wrote: > I was thinking of various uses one could put a Raspberry Pi to, and a > question occurred to me. I know the Model B (and B+) have an Ethernet port > built in. Has anyone ever seen a shield, or other method (besides USB) of > including an additional port on the Pi?
Absolutely. Several companies make ethernet shields. Typically they communicate with Arduino using something called SPI (Serial Peripherals Interface), which uses I think 3 GPIO pins to form a multi-device bus. The shield contains its own microprocessor which handles the connections and the low-level details. In your arduino code you use a high-level API that exposes a simple sockets API to your code. You can use this to write a simple web server if you wish, or handle telnet or something else. Also ethernet shields all come with a SD card slot as well for some reason. > I know that the GPIO pins will > allow you to do a lot via shields and/or expansion boards connected via > ribbon cable, but I don't know if there's a good way of linking the GPIO > pins to the pins to the pins of an Ethernet controller (or Fast Ethernet or > whatever). Does anyone know of such a device? If so, does it work with the > standard Raspbian distro? I know there are "Ethernet shields" for Arduino, > but then I'd have to write a heck of a lot more code to do the same thing > as I can accomplish with Raspbian on the Pi and a board that provides an > extra Ethernet port. Not to mention how much slower an Arduino is compared > to the CPU on the RPi. Mating a Raspberry Pi with an arduino is also very useful. They can communicate with each other via serial. Then the Pi can do more complicated stuff like run a real web server, and the arduino can run certain real-time hardware tasks and interface with hardware. Arduino is easier for beginners like me to interface with hardware, as it's 5v, and many components are 5v. The Pi itself is 3.3v, so you have to convert the logic for interfacing with some parts. I have a special little arduino board called the Gertduino (IIRC) that mates with the rasberry pi's connector on one side, and has the normal arduino pin layout on the other side so you can attach shields to it. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
