Okay, time to figure out how the GPIO pins work on the Raspberry Pi. What voltages do we get? Answer: 3.3 volts from the GPIO pins. In other words, straight out the max voltage of your laser module. Also the typical voltage for CMOS circuits, of course. Also, note that the Raspberry Pi Zero provides 3.3 volt and 5 volt pins. These are digital-only pins, of course. If you need analog and such, you’ll have to use ADC and DAC devices.
20161228/DuckDuckGo raspberry pi gpio voltage
20161228/https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/usage/gpio/
20161228/https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=40150&p=329080
Wait, what was the alternative mentioned on Adafruit to soldering a pin header to the Raspberry Pi GPIO pin slots?
Adafruit page for Raspberry Pi Zero v1.3:
20161228/https://www.adafruit.com/products/2885
Oh, it was HATs. Pi HATS & PLATES:
20161228/https://www.adafruit.com/categories/286
So you want Wi-Fi and Blutooth for your Raspberry Pi Zero? You can use this Red Bear IoT pHAT to gain those. $16.95 though, so not cheap compared to the Raspberry Pi Zero.
20161228/https://www.adafruit.com/products/3329
- UPDATE 2019-11-20: Raspberry Pi Zero W was released as an alternative with built-in Wi-Fi, so you can use that if you don’t mind having short antennas. Otherwise, to get longer antennas, you are better off with just Raspberry Pi Zero and rolling your own solution for wireless.
Now, this one is particularly interesting. It is a TFT LCD touchscreen that uses GPIO rather than HDMI. So, I am told that using GPIO rather than HDMI brings the cost down by not needing to include an HDMI decoder. Well, given the cost, $19.95, for the size of its display outputs, 5” or 7” displays, this has a pretty good cost. Oh, wait, is the display not included? I may be doing my cost equations wrong if this is the case. Yep, TFT display not included. Okay, so I was a little bit misled by the price, then.
20161228/https://www.adafruit.com/products/2453
Now this one is also an interesting one. 3D sensor? How does it work? This 3D sensor uses electric charge sensing, so it specifically does not work on conductive materials such as metals.
20161228/https://www.adafruit.com/products/2325
Cirrus Logic sound card. Now, why do I include this? Well, the most interesting thing mentioned on the page is the sampling quality for output. 24-bit 192 kHz. Yes, so good enough to do ultrasound, at least low-frequency ultrasound that is.
20161228/https://www.adafruit.com/products/1761
On the Raspberry Pi Zero Adafruit page, there are links to many other HOWTOs for interesting things that you can do with your Raspberry Pi Zero.
But, the most interesting of them all, this article on how to build a Raspberry Pi Wearable Time Lapse Camera. At one of the steps, it recommends 3D printing for the case, so this is definitely being written by a digerati and their related socioeconomic status, not so much for more normal people for whom owning a 3D printer would be a prohibitive expense.
Also, it has instructions on how to setup a Lithium-ion polymer battery to power your Raspberry Pi. The battery and board requires additional surface area space similar to that of the Raspberry Pi Zero times two, so the resulting construction is not nearly as compact as I thought from the looks of the picture. Then again, that’s probably also why the Raspberry Pi camera looks so small on the face of the device, simply because the device itself is a bit bigger than I expected.
20161228/https://learn.adafruit.com/raspberry-pi-wearable-time-lapse-camera
Oh, and for the camera lens. I see what happened. In the pictures, there is a supplementary lens placed in front of the main construction.
Oh, and actually, the battery and control circuit are stacked underneath the Raspberry Pi Zero.
Oh, and at the end… it includes a section on converting to video. It indicates that there are very many different ways to do this, and illustrates only one way that uses proprietary software, in addition to making suggestions about the use of proprietary software. So, there you go. Definitely a digerati.
Turn your Raspberry Pi Zero into a USB gadget? This is what I have been looking for! It’s exactly it! So, here is what it does. You have a Raspberry Pi Zero, and you want to plug it into a PC just as if it were a USB networking device or a USB flash drive. How do you do it? Through the Linux USB gadgets system.
20161228/https://learn.adafruit.com/turning-your-raspberry-pi-zero-into-a-usb-gadget
One thing that I must comment on is that this howto says that you need a USB console cable. Well, technically you don’t even need that for prep, what you can do is prep the image inside of a Raspberry Pi emulator on your PC, and once it is ready, you can copy the image to your MicroSD card, insert that into your Raspberry Pi, and just boot right up.
Also, as an aside, did you see the PuTTY dialog box? How many different gadgets did this article writer purchase? Yeah, again, we’re kind of running up against a digerati here, for sure.
Indeed, the Linux USB gadgets system has been around for quite a long time. It looks like Overo Gumstix was instrumental in its development, along with many other earlier embedded chipsets. Of course, this was all before they were nearly as cheap as they are today.
20161228/http://www.linux-usb.org/gadget/
So, what about Overo Gumstix? Can I get more history from Wikipedia. Unfortunately, no. But, their website has a little tiny bit of history in the “About us” section.
20161228/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumstix
20161228/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gumstix_oconnor.JPG
20161228/https://www.gumstix.com/
20161228/https://www.gumstix.com/about-us/
I must admit, the Overo Gumstix extension board does make the Gumstix a little bit more powerful than the Raspberry Pi with a little bit less space. Oh, sure, maybe there are appropriate Pi HATs I can get to do likewise with the Rapsberry Pi.
Wait, wait. You need a lot more information if you want to use the USB console cable on a Raspberry Pi Zero successfully. Namely, you need to know the GPIO pin-out. What is that, anyways? Can you show me exactly what it is? Unfortunately, that is a bit harder to come across. Yes it’s true that the Raspberry Pi community is among the biggest of embedded systems communities, but it feels that it just isn’t all that big compared to the pure software developer communities. Not as big in total size. Well, never fear, even though there is a shortage of information on the Raspberry Pi Zero, I’ve found just enough information to verify that the GPIO pins are designed to be compatible with that of the older systems (B2), and from the schematic diagrams and photos, I’ve found that the “J8” label on the top of the Raspberry Pi Zero board is indeed indicative of the orientation of the GPIO pin labels between the schematic and the physical board.
20170518/https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=127116
Also, never fear about your existing console cable being the wrong one. Studying one of the photographs carefully, you do indeed have the same kind of cable as was shown in the picture. Yet the red lead supplies 5 volts, but the TxD and RxD leads should be the correct CMOS logic level. The “TTL” label in your packaging may have just been an error on ThinkPenguin’s part, but the manufacturer of the device should be the same.
- But wait! Even on Adafruit, they call it a “USB to TTL” serial cable, even though it is really a “USB to CMOS” serial cable. UPDATE 2019-11-20: the cable likely auto-detects TTL/CMOS logic levels.
Before you can use the CMOS serial connection, you must enable it using one of these two methods:
- Edit
/boot/config.txt. At the bottom, last line, addenable_uart=1. You can do this on the SD card directly from a computer, rather than booting the Raspberry Pi.
- Note that on my version of Raspbian, I have found that
enable_uartdoes not cause any changes. Maybe this only has an effect on newer versions of Raspbian. Or maybe only on older versions.
-
sudo raspi-config- Advanced Options > Serial > Yes
- When asked to reboot, answer “yes.”
Yep, just like you must enable the camera before you can use it. Security, security. Yes, I know, this is a good default configuration, especially since the Raspberry Pi Zero has so many hardware features and functions that a novice could get lost and accidentally leave some unwanted features enabled.
And remember, connect to the serial console just like this:
sudo screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200
Oh yeah, and before you get stuck not being able to login. In the Raspbian default distribution image, the default “pi” user’s password is “raspberry”.
Actually, honestly, for the Ethernet gadget, you don’t even have to log into your Raspberry Pi to make those modifications. You can make them entirely by tweaking the configuration options on the SD card from your computer. So, you don’t need to have any extra computer hardware beyond the Raspberry Pi Zero to get started.
Finally, one last note on the Ethernet gadget. On older GNU/Linux distributions, you’ll have to manually run the following command to setup Bonjour/Zeroconf networking on your hot-plugged network device:
sudo avahi-autoipd usb0
20170518/https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruits-raspberry-pi-lesson-5-using-a-console-cable
Some very important photos and diagrams illustrating how to wire the serial console up. It goes like this:
O R* B W G O O
[] O O O O O O
J8
That is, looking from the Raspberry Pi Zero from the top (“J8” marking visible), “square pin” at bottom left, the pins should be plugged into the top row, with the left-most pin hole empty. Then, the next pin to the right can be the red 5V power pin, which is optional. Only use this if you want to power your Raspberry Pi from the console cable. After that to the right, the black ground pin should be plugged in, next the white TxD pin to the right, and last to the right is the green RxD pin.
20170518/https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruits-raspberry-pi-lesson-5-using-a-console-cable/connect-the-lead
20170518/https://learn.adafruit.com/assets/35695
These are the schematics, plus a few select links from the list:
20170518/https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/schematics/README.md
20170518/https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/schematics/Raspberry-Pi-Zero-V1.3-Schematics.pdf
20170518/https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/schematics/Raspberry-Pi-2B-V1.2-Schematics.pdf
20170518/https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/schematics/Raspberry-Pi-A-Plus-V1.1-Schematics.pdf
This site particularly has the important diagram where a “square pad” is shown for some of the pins, necessary to understand with confidence the physical hardware orientation.
20170518/https://pinout.xyz/
Here is some additional information from Wikipedia to help increase confidence.
20170518/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Connectors
20170518/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Location_of_connectors_and_ICs_on_Raspberry_Pi_Zero.svg
This is also useful. How do you enable the Raspberry Pi camera
without needing to boot your Raspberry Pi and use raspi-config?
Edit /boot/config.txt and use start_x=1 to enable, start_x=0 to
disable. I know, weird name there, but that’s how you do it.
20170520/DuckDuckGo raspberry pi enable camera
20170520/https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/usage/camera/
20170520/https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/10357/enable-camera-without-raspi-config
So, I ask the question. Is paper a viable anti-static material? If you build a computer case out of paper or cardboard, would that provide sufficient protection for static-sensitive components? The answer is yes.
20161228/DuckDuckGo plastic case static sensitive electronic equipment
Industrial supplier of carrying cases for sensitive equipment.
20161228/http://www.iqsdirectory.com/carrying-cases/
20161228/DuckDuckGo is paper anti-static
20161228/https://hardforum.com/threads/antistatic-bag-alternatives.1574261/
4LC4PON3 wrote:
this is directly from the PDF they emailed me when I shipped out my GPU to them
Please avoid the use of soft packages or padded mail envelopes as they will not provide adequate protection for the product. Any damage caused by inadequate protection during transit will void the warranty and the product will be shipped back as is.
Please put the product in an anti-static bag (use a brown paper bag if an anti-static bag is not available) before packing the product. Avoid any materials which may increase risk for static electricity discharge such as aluminum foil, electrical tape, duct tape, etc. Only the faulty item is required. Please do not send any accessories
20161228/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antistatic_bag
20161228/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Antistatic_Bags.jpg
But, remember, paper has its anti-static limits. In my own anecdotal experience, in the winter, I’ve noticed small amounts of static discharging through my body through the wallpaper on the walls, maybe to neutralize with the “ground” of the sheet-rock in the walls.
Note that you can also buy special anti-static paper. But, that’s a little bit beyond the initial motive of being able to use scratch paper that you have around your regular physical environment.
20161228/https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/anti-static-for-paper.html
20161228/http://www.correctproducts.com/ESD-Cleanroom-Products/ESD-Binders-Paper-Sheet-Protectors/ESD-Paper_4.html
What are the RUN pins on the Raspberry Pi Zero? If you connect the two pins, that causes a RESET to the Broadcom CPU.
20170520/DuckDuckGo raspberry pi run pins
20170520/https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/29339/what-are-the-run-pin-holes-on-raspberry-pi-2