Tandy UK Introducing Raspberry Pi Gertboard Compatible

Tandy, the UK electronics company, is introducing an electronics kit compatible with the Raspberry Pi Getboard experimenters board.

The Gertboard is no longer available in kit form but has come out as an assembled board available from a number of vendors including Sparkfun.

I am glad to see the Gertboard receive a resurgence after the initial kit issue and subsequent withdraw from the market.  I would love to see some experiments or projects using these boards.

Assembled Gertboard Now Available From Sparkfun

The Gertboard was the first add-on board announced for the Raspberry Pi.  It was delayed a number of times but finally was released as a kit for a limited time from Europe.  Now the second wave has arrived in the US via a complete board from Sparkfun Electronics.

Gertboard October 2012 ("Version 2")

The design is rather bold - rather than having a few functions, the board has many features including a AVR (Arduino type) helper controller.  It has GPIO buffers and motors.  Finally it has an 8 bit dual channel digital to analog converter and a dual channel analog to digital converter.

The October 2012 branded version design differs from the March 2012 DIY board.  The ribbon cable to connect to the Raspberry Pi is now a direct connect stackable header.  The fuse for the motor driver is enclosed and a different motor driver chip used,  More surface mount parts are used including the voltage regulator and LEDs.

Gertboard March 2012 ("Version 1")

This board is a fantastic way to experiment with the Raspberry Pi - out of the box, the Pi is rather limited on connection capabilities.  The Gertboard opens up the capabilities to perform nearly any function one might want to do: control, robotics, sensing.

It still does not allow connection of Arduino compatible shields as it uses a proprietary dual row header.  This can be adapted though not directly.  The Breadboard Shield Adapter brings an Arduino shield pins to one side where one would have to manually connect the various pins.  Not perfect but doable.  Maybe the next revision of the Gertboard will allow for a better connection.

Breadboard Shield Adapter

These boards should see adoption in schools and other learning situations and hobbyists who want to tinker around.  Hopefully mopre projects will be published using the board.  The link to get one from Sparkfun is https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11773

Gertboard Completed

I posted on October 24th that I had received my Gertboard from Newark, shortly before they discontinued it as a kit.  With the holidays and making my Cylon Pumpkin, I did not have time to build it until December.

It turned out rather well.  Although the parts were not labeled well, I managed to get them all starting with the tiny surface mount components.  I highly suggest a good pair of tweezers like they sell at Adafruit, etc. and a magnifier if you need one.  Gert recommends holding parts in place with a sponge but I prefer Blue Tack meant to hold things on a wall - it's much like silly putty and resists drying out.  It molds to the coponents and keeps them fairly straight.

The headers were a challenge as they came in rows of 18 (singles) and I needed longer to do well so I supplemented with my bench stock.  The long double was short one row and the Arduino JTAG long by one so I suppose it was meant to be cut but cutting a double is not good as they shatter rather than break off with diagnal cutters. 

I have not tested it functionally (still alot going on along with the new Esplora and AlaMode).

I was hoping they would be a bit easier to come by to get the community helping with applications.  For now I suggest Gordon's site for some projects.

Gertboard Availability Follow-up

The Raspberry Pi forums are humming today with posts on the fate of the Gertboard but no word from the Raspberry Pi Foundation nor additional posts by Farnell the distributor.  The only post I saw from inventor Gert van Loo was a response on a copyright on the name which he confirmed he had.

What little is known is that both Farnell and Tandy have zero stock and Farnell has discontinued the kit product.  It appears the board may be back as a completed board but would a manufacturer want to redesign things to take more advantage of surface mount for pick-n-place machines?  Would they wish to edge out our man Gert from the process?

Well some folks are posting on actually using their Raspberry Pi + Gertboard.  See Youtube here and here.  I have yet to start my build (I hear it's about 3.5 hours to do) and I'm committed to get the house ready for Hurricane Sandy :(

Is there a Gertboard Availability Controversy?

As I stated in my last post, I received my Raspberry Pi expansion Gertboard yesterday.  The main conclusion was I wasn't impressed with the Newark/Element14 way of packaging it all and I'm still not fond of surface mount parts.  The soldering may be a bit easier though - as of today I received my Hakko 888 soldering iron from Adafruit.

But reading the Interwebs today, it appears that my impressions on availability have blown up from an observation into a real problem.  The item is no longer available from Element14/Farnell (not just out of stock) with a FAQ update and a posting stating:

"Thank you for your inquiry. Unfortunately we are not taking any new orders for the Gertboard at present as this one is going discontinued. We have a new Gertboard that will be launched shortly updates on this will be available through the element14 website."

A NEW GERTBOARD??  REALLY? Ok I have two Rev 1 Raspberry Pis and now a Gen1 Gertboard limited edition unassembled.  Now the Pis I don't mind to much (but I really would like the extra 256K RAM on the Rev Bs).  But I was hoping for a slew of cool things to do with the Gertboard based on tutorials and code written for education (this was a RasPi Foundation sanctioned board mainly for education).  Do I have a dinosaur 24 hours on?

The Raspberry Pi forum appears to have many posts just today on the issue.  This thread has boiled it down to Farnell deciding the experiment in making such kits was not a good one and they appear to be leaning towards selling whole boards.  This could require FCC and European RF certification and who knows which  way it could all go.

A few hours ago I was rather excited.  Now it all seems like a mess.  Anyone have thoughts on the issue?

Gertboard Arrived

I received my Gertboard yesterday, having order it way back on August 9th.  The Gertboard is an add-on electronics control board approved by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.  I ordered it from Newark for US delivery.  Rather strange really, it has a label with my name and Farnell/Element17 from the UK but it was supposedly posted UPS via a second label from Newark, Gaffney, South Carolina, US.

That aside, I received the board and two plastic bags of parts.  All the parts seem to be in individual bags, like they were picked from a warehouse that way, even the chips each have individual plastic chip carriers (not electrostatic foam), each in a bag.  I'll have to download any instructions required from the web (and that's known just because I read a Raspberry Pi blog post).

Why do I sound disappointed as I knew this was a kit?  Well Tandy in the UK also bought some boards but made their own kits.  Those kits appear to package the parts in order of assembly with instructions (see this blog post for more on the Tandy package).

At least the kit comes with colored jumpers to help interconnect parts.  It takes the sting out of having to learn to solder about 13 surface-mount resistors and capacitors (Note to Newark et al. - even your new partner Adafruit does the surface mounting for their customers).

Apparently Newark is stating they have sold out and are not accepting further orders.  Given I paid $20 for shipping (rather steep from South Carolina to my East Coast home), I would suggest waiting for Tandy to get them back in stock.