SusaNET

There’s something exciting about crossing the boundary between the abstract world of software and the physical ‘real world’, and a relay driven from a GPIO pin seemed like a good example of this. Although a simple project, I still learned some new things about the Raspberry Pi while doing it.

There are only four components required, and the cost for these is around 70p, so it would be a good candidate for a classroom exercise. Even a cheap relay like the Omron G5LA-1 5DC can switch loads of 10A at 240V. Continue reading →

Having recently received my Raspberry Pi, one of the first things I wanted to do was hook up a real-time clock chip I had lying around (a NXP PCF8563) and learn how to drive I2C from the BCM2835 hardware registers. Turns out it’s quite easy to do, and I think makes a useful project to learn with.

So, here are some notes I made getting it to work, initially with Chris Boot’s forked kernel that incorporates some I2C handling code created by Frank Buss into the kernel’s I2C bus driver framework.

After getting it to work with the kernel drivers, I created some C code to drive the RTC chip directly using the BCM2835 I2C registers, using mmap() to expose Peripheral IO space in the user’s (virtual) memory map, the technique I learned from Gert’s Gertboard demo software, though my code’s simpler (hopefully without limiting functionality!).

Note: Revision 2 boards require the code to access BSC1 (I2C1) rather than BSC0 (I2C0), so changes to the peripheral base address may be required, or in the case if the Linux I2C driver, a reference to i2c-1 rather than i2c-0. It should be simple enough, but I don’t want to write about things I haven’t done or tested, so a bit of extra work by the reader may be required.

Continue reading →