This website was originally written in Ruby and hosted on the Raspberry Pi. It's now archived at GitHub for posterity!

Quick2Wire For Raspberry Pi

I've had in my possession for the last few weeks a Quick2Wire kit waiting patiently to be soldered-up and reviewed. Sadly I've just not had the time to do it yet, and I must thank Romilly for not calling me out on this… yet!

The Quick2Wire combo kit is an excellent expandable and extensible breakout kit for those wishing to do some serious IO on the Raspberry Pi without resorting to an Arduino to handle the workload.

It's available to order now and will cost between £26.77 and £31.91 depending on your location. This sounds a little on the pricey side, but you've got to take into consideration the fact that it's produced in much lower volumes than the Pi itself. This price should also include VAT and delivery.

The combo kit boasts a number of features including the all important GPIO pin protection, using diodes and resistors to catch incorrect voltages and overcurrent. It also includes a 3.3v regulator connected to the Pi's 5v supply, delivering a much more useful 3.3v power supply than the very limited 3.3v pin on the Pi itself. I've used a regulator from 5v down to 3.3v when hooking up an Arduino to my Pi, and must attest to its usefulness.

The port expander delivers an extra 16 GPIO pins over and above the 8 on the board itself, and you can drive all of these using Gordon's excellent wiringPi. See Gordon's post for more information.

Once up and running I plan to make sure you can use the Quick2Wire board from my wiringPi wrappers ( which I'm very, very aware are getting a little neglected! ), this should hopefully make it an easy and familiar device for existing users to pick up and play with.

« Back to index Posted on 2013-02-05 by