Raspberry Pi2’s and HATS

With the 2015 science and engineering family day fast approaching and the release of the new Raspberry Pi 2 Erica is to get a performance boost. With the additional processing power and memory on the new Pis, Erica will be able to do more and react faster.  Further updates coming on that soon.

As the Pi B+ and Pi 2 have a new form factor, the original interfacing electronics built on Humble Pi prototyping boards no longer fit particularly well. To fix this we have created a Pi HAT (Hardware Attached on Top).  This contains the electronics to interface between the pi and the rest of the electronics inside Erica. These new boards have been designed with all of Erica’s interfaces on a single board, we can then populate the sections of the board that are to be used on each Pi. We are also moving to surface mount components in order to fit all the interfaces into a space a fifth of the size, allowing for all the interfaces to be combined.

Erica HAT board
Erica HAT board design

The designs for this board can be found on Erica’s GitHub page at https://github.com/EricaTheRhino/PI_HAT_BOARD

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