Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
operate. he open collector driver can control the power supplies of up to six devices simultane-
ously without requiring any hardware. his gives the Gertboard a large amount of lexibility—
although transistors or relays can be used with passive add-on boards like the Prototyping Pi
Plate to achieve the same goal.
Figure 13-10:
Connecting a
potentiometer
to the
Gertboard's
ADC pins
Finally, the Gertboard provides access to a 28-pin microcontroller, which can be itted to a
socket located on the board itself. When itted, the Gertboard can be wired to address either
the Raspberry Pi's GPIO port or the microcontroller, or a combination of the two. he
Gertboard is designed to operate with an Atmel ATmega168 or ATmega328 microcon-
troller—the same type of microcontroller used in the Arduino prototyping project. When
itted, you can write programs for the Gertboards' ATmega microcontroller in the Atmel IDE,
giving the Pi a useful level of compatibility with the wide array of existing ATmega-targeted
software available to download. It also gives the Pi the ability to address external hardware in
a real-time manner, with the microcontroller taking over responsibility for hardware inter-
facing and simply providing feedback to the Pi.
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