Introducing the Raspberry Pi robot shield
Channel: Ben Schrauwen
Date: 06/12/2012

Help me fund the manufacturing of the Raspberry Pi Robotic Shield at circuits.io/campaigns/1
Robots are becoming more and more important in our world. Often, robots are driven by small microcontroller boards, but these have limited capabilities (e.g. it is not possible to use state-of-the-art robot frameworks such as ROS) and are not easy to connect to the internet.
The Raspberry Pi is a powerful and cheap linux board which would be ideal to implement advanced robot control algorithms. There are however no readily available extensions available to allow it to drive motors or read sensor values.
This is why I designed an open hardware Raspberry Pi robotic shield which makes it very easy to control robots, even over the internet! I designed the shield using existing open hardware modules on circuits.io. It even comes with a powerful voltage regulator allowing to both power the shield and the Raspberry Pi from a battery.
I launched a bootstrap campaign at circuits.io (circuits.io/campaign/1) to raise the required funding to be able to get this board manufactured at a compelling price.
Main features:
-plugs right into the GPIO header of the Raspberry Pi
-ability to drive two 1.4A motors at the battery voltage
-connectors for two RC servos
-4 analog input channels to connect sensors
-ability to power both the shield and the Raspberry Pi from an external battery, allowing fully untethered operation
-Microchip PIC based core, compatible with the Dwengo platform and library. This platform was originally developed for education and has many tutorial, examples and an active development forum
-open source shield firmware
-example Raspberry Pi code to demonstrate all features of the shield