Nuts and Volts - June 2014

available on my website (www.JR Hackett.net) as is the datasheet.

PCB Update

For the past few months, I’ve been working on several different PICAXE-Pi PCBs — two of which will be available on my website by the time you read this article. The first one — the RazzPi-LCD board — is shown in Figure 12. It inserts directly into the Pi’s 2x13 GPIO header and provides access to all 17 GPIO pins: six for the LCD; 10 for the breadboard that sits on top of the Pi’s plastic case; and one for an onboard pushbutton switch.

The RazzPi-LCD board simplifies the breadboard wiring because wire jumpers can easily be used to connect any of the 10 available GPIO pins directly to the breadboard circuit. However, you can also use the second board (RazzPi- 20) in conjunction with RazzPi-LCD as shown in Figure 13.

The RazzPi- 20 board accepts either a 20M2 or 20X2 PICAXE processor. Two of the processor’s I/O pins are inserted into the Pi GPIO pins 14 and 15, so the PICAXE can communicate serially with the Pi without any additional wiring. If you’re interested in either of these boards, you can visit my website for more details.

Another Request for Feedback

We’ve reached the end of the sixth Primer installment that’s been dedicated to PICAXE-Pi projects. Before we embarked on this little side journey, I asked for some email feedback to let me know whether there was a significant interest in exploring the PICAXE-Pi possibilities. A surprising number of readers said “yes,” so that’s what we did. Now that a year has passed, I think it’s time for me to again ask for feedback, so here are my questions: • What would you like to see in upcoming columns?