Fen Logic Gertboard - Raspberry Pi A User Manual

Fen Logic Gertboard

Properly termed the Raspberry Pi I/O Extension, the Gertboard (shown in Figure 16-7) is
named for its inventor, Gert van Loo. An employee of Broadcom and a member of the team
that designed the BCM2835 SoC processor at the heart of the Raspberry Pi, van Loo created
the Gertboard as a way of unlocking some of the power of the chip hidden by the Pi's overall
design and providing a powerful and versatile platform for electronic tinkering.
Unlike the Slice of Pi and Prototyping Pi Plate, the Gertboard is an active add-on board with
numerous components designed to extend the functionality of the Pi. The Gertboard pro-
vides 12 buffered IO ports with status LEDs, three push-button switches, six open collector
drivers, a 48 V 4 A motor controller, a two-channel digital to analogue converter (DAC) and a
two-channel analogue to digital converter (ADC). Additionally, the Gertboard has support for
an additional 28-pin microcontroller, such as the Atmel ATmega328 used in the Arduino
prototyping system, which can be inserted into a socket on the Gertboard and programmed
directly from the Raspberry Pi.
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Figure 16-6:
The Pi Plate
connected to a
cased Raspberry
Pi