Operation Manual

Fen Logic Gertboard
Properly termed the Raspberry Pi I/O Extension, the Gertboard (shown in Figure 13-7) is named for its inventor Gert van Loo.
An employee of Broadcom and a member of the team that designed the BCM2835 SoC processor at the heart of the Raspberry
Pi, van Loo created the Gertboard as a way of unlocking some of the power of the chip hidden by the Pi’s overall design and
providing a powerful and versatile platform for electronic tinkering.
Figure 13-7: The Gertboard, designed by Gert van Loo
Unlike the Slice of Pi and Prototyping Pi Plate, the Gertboard is an active add-on board with numerous components designed to
extend the functionality of the Pi. The Gertboard provides 12 buffered IO ports with status LEDs, three push-button switches,
six open collector drivers, a 48 V 4 A motor controller, a two-channel digital to analogue converter (ADC) and a two-channel
analogue to digital converter (DAC). Additionally, the Gertboard has support for an additional 28-pin microcontroller, such as
the Atmel ATmega328 used in the Arduino prototyping system, which can be inserted into a socket on the Gertboard and
programmed directly from the Raspberry Pi.
As the list of features indicates, the Gertboard is a powerful and complex device. Its flexibility makes it a great choice for more
complex projects—but that same complexity affects its size. The Gertboard is almost two-and-a-half times larger than the
Raspberry Pi itself, making it both the most powerful and the largest add-on board for the Pi available at the time of writing. To
counteract its size, the Gertboard connects to the Pi through a ribbon cable terminated in male sockets (see Figure 13-8). This
cable allows the Gertboard to sit away from the Pi, or to be mounted in a project permanently yet still be quickly detached from
the Pi if necessary.
Figure 13-8: The Gertboard connected to a Raspberry Pi