Idea: Porting IOIO library to Raspberry Pi using WiFi dongle, USB cable and bluetooth dongle

[Yan ZHANG]

Raspberry Pi will be avaiblable soon by the end of the year. It is a
cheap tiny linux PC and can run Ubuntu, with real USB handling
capabilities:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/11-2

It costs 25 US dollars!

I know that Ytai is considering using WiFi dongle on Sparkfun IOIO.
And I know it's painful to write USB drivers on PIC24.

I really like the way how IOIO integrate the electronics programming
in Android development. If Raspberry Pi can provide such a platform to
handle PWM, UART etc while easily supporting WiFi dongles, and it is
so cheap, why not? IOIO can get a new life!

I suggest 3 ways to interface with Android using WiFi:

http://www.diyphonegadgets.com/2011/10/3-possible-ways-for-android-to-control.html

Imagine that you push a IOIO firmware library to Raspberry Pi to
handle WiFi/USB/bluetooth connectivity with Android while doing the
PWM in/out stuff, and you develop Android apps using the IOIO library,
what a wonderful world!

Thanks,

Yan in Paris

[Ytai Ben-Tsvi]

Raspberry Pi seems amazing. I have no idea how they managed to push all these features for $25 retail. For comparison, IOIO parts alone cost around $18 excluding the PCB and assembly costs. I'm really curious to see if they'll be able to stand up for this price, which will be very exciting.

One thing I couldn't find on the Raspberry is the I/O modules and pins. Assuming you run the IOIO stack on the Raspberry - what will you do with it? What can it connect to other than USB devices, network and a monitor? Are you talking about using the Raspberry as is, or about designing a new board deriving for the Raspberry?

As far as porting the IOIO firmware, I guess some code can be reused, while other parts will need a complete rewrite.

BTW, are you personally involved in Raspberry development?

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[Ytai Ben-Tsvi]

Does any one have information on how it compares to the BeagleBoard (except cost)?

Also, @Yan, would love your feedback on my I/O questions

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 10:52 AM, Krishna <krishna...@gmail.com> wrote:

They are a not for profit organisation, backed by Chuck moore, Forth programming. They will probably build millions rather in thousands to achieve the target price. Already ARM11 based tablet backed by the Indian government is retailing for $50 (this one comes with out a screen so can easily have a saving of $15 equates to around $35 which is what they Board B costs)

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[Krishna]

They are a not for profit organisation, backed by Chuck moore, Forth programming. They will probably build millions rather in thousands to achieve the target price. Already ARM11 based tablet backed by the Indian government is retailing for $50 (this one Ra PI comes with out a screen so can easily have a saving of $15 compared to the cheapo indian tablet, which equates to around $35 which is what their Board B costs)

[Krishna]

I think the first of these boards will be available to public only end of next month in UK, unless  Yan has some direct links with the development.

[John Chamberlain]

This raspberry pie seems very interesting. As it runs on arm, ditching Linux and putting android on it shouldn't be to difficult. Connect it to ioio and through bt and use a tiuchscreen and it would be very small for my project. Interesting ideas

[Ytai Ben-Tsvi]

What will connecting one Android to another Android give you? The missing bit here is the I/O connectivity on the extra board, which doesn't seem to be offered by Raspberry. Don't get me wrong - it looks amazing, but it seems to address a different problem than IOIO. I'm very curious to know how easy of hard it will be to make a similar board that has lots of I/O and ease of access. No doubt a board with so much compute power and a Linux port makes a nicer development platform than a MCU, and will possibly enable software implementation for some of the stuff that PIC24 implements in hardware, but it is probably a non-trivial task.

Does anyone know of ARM-core based microcontrollers that have all the nice peripherals MCUs usually come with (A/D, PWM, input capture, UART, SPI, I2C, etc)?

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 11:16 AM, John Chamberlain <cham...@gmail.com> wrote:

This raspberry pie seems very interesting. As it runs on arm, ditching Linux and putting android on it shouldn't be to difficult. Connect it to ioio and through bt and use a tiuchscreen and it would be very small for my project. Interesting ideas

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[John Chamberlain]

Well I was thinking more of using the Raspberry Pi as the android device and connecting it to the IOIO  and a touchscreen, giving me, perhaps, a way to run Android without using a phone or the android x86 issues. Was just an idle thought but I might try it out. Hell it's only 25 bucks!

[Ytai Ben-Tsvi]

Gotcha

On Nov 7, 2011 12:07 PM, "John Chamberlain" <cham...@gmail.com> wrote:

Well I was thinking more of using the Raspberry Pi as the android device and connecting it to the IOIO  and a touchscreen, giving me, perhaps, a way to run Android without using a phone or the android x86 issues. Was just an idle thought but I might try it out. Hell it's only 25 bucks!

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[ZHANG Yan]

Hello Ytai,

No, I am not Raspberry Pi developer. I am just ordinary IOIO user like everyone and just discovered Raspberry Pi when desperately looking for WiFi solutions for IOIO;)

As for I/O pins, here is what the official WiKi says:

http://elinux.org/RaspberryPiBoard#Components

General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO), I2C, I2S, SPI

There are approximately 16 spare GPIOs, which are brought out to 1.27mm pin-strip. Voltage levels are 3v3. The connector choice is deliberately annoying to connect to directly; there is no over-voltage protection on the board so the intention is that people interested in serious interfacing will use an external board with buffers, level conversion and analog I/O rather than soldering directly onto the main board.

We also bring 2x I2C (3v3), I2S and an SPI (3v3) interface out to the same connector. We support one slave interface for I2C and one for SPI.

UART

J2 (on the alpha boards) is a UART:

Pin	Function
1	3.3V
2	GND
3	TX
4	RX

Kernel boot messages go to this UART at 115200bps.

MIPI CSI-2 & DSI

We also bring out MIPI CSI-2 & DSI interfaces to a 1.27 mm pinstrip.

It seems that BeagleBone (http://beagleboard.org/bone) is more I/O-Pin-friendly but it's really cool to figure out a way keep IOIO's hardware low-cost. 

I found that ARM itself is Cambridge based and that Cambridge University is the sponsor of Raspberry Pi. That's possibly why it is so cheap while using ARM11.

What if we make IOIO a usb device that can be plugged to Raspberry Pi (and to BeagleBoard/BeagleBone)?

Cheers,

Yan in Paris

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 9:07 PM, John Chamberlain <cham...@gmail.com> wrote:

Well I was thinking more of using the Raspberry Pi as the android device and connecting it to the IOIO  and a touchscreen, giving me, perhaps, a way to run Android without using a phone or the android x86 issues. Was just an idle thought but I might try it out. Hell it's only 25 bucks!

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