Category: Raspberry Pi

trying out fritzing app

whbeebe

I’ve seen breadboard diagrams such as the one to the left on many web sites and in many magazine articles devoted to the Raspberry Pi. Today I finally found the tool capable of producing these diagrams: Fritzing App. What’s nice about this tool is it’s available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. I installed the version for the Mac on my Mac Mini and whipped out the diagram to the left.

This is my test cylon LED circuitry.

This is my third attempt. My first two were thrown away as I learned the rudiments of how to operate the software.

I like how the wiring diagram is most like the physical component layout. This makes wiring up the Raspberry Pi very approachable to the novice who want to wire something together for the first time, especially when those novices are in a class setting.

The tool appears to create more main-stream schematic diagrams from the breadboard layout, and there’s another section of the tool that appears to help create PCB layouts as well. You can then feed that PCB to Fritzing, and for a fee Fritzing will create PCBs from your designs.

more rpi gpio code using wiring pi

whbeebe

My second little C-language app using Wiring Pi as the enabling framework. This one flashes the LEDs in a more elaborate pattern and uses bit patterns in a byte array that we move down. The bit patterns in the low nibble of each byte allow any (or all) of the LEDs to be turned on or off. Code follows.

#include <wiringPi.h>// Instead of hard coding a blink pattern, we use bit patterns in a byte// array, which can be set to any low nibble value. A '1' turns on an LED// in that corresponding position, a '0' turns it off.//static unsigned char glyphs[] = { 0x0, 0x1, 0x3, 0x7, 0xf, 0xe, 0xc, 0x8,  0x0, 0x8, 0xc, 0xe, 0xf, 0x7, 0x3, 0x1 };int main () {wiringPiSetup();pinMode(0, OUTPUT);pinMode(1, OUTPUT);pinMode(2, OUTPUT);pinMode(3, OUTPUT);for (int i = 0; i < 20; ++i) {for (int j = 0; j < sizeof(glyphs); ++j ) { // Just a series of shifts and ANDs to create the bit necessary // to write out to the GPIO pin.//digitalWrite(0, glyphs[j] & 0x1); digitalWrite(1, (glyphs[j] >> 1 ) & 0x1 );digitalWrite(2, (glyphs[j] >> 2 ) & 0x1 );digitalWrite(3, (glyphs[j] >> 3 ) & 0x1 );delay(50);}}// Turn everything off.//digitalWrite(0, LOW);digitalWrite(1, LOW);digitalWrite(2, LOW);digitalWrite(3, LOW);return 0 ;}