RasPiComm v3

I want to give you a short update about the RasPiComm progress. You’ll find the schematics of v3 below.

I reworked the whole board and rerouted it all. I tried to implement as much feature requests as I could while preserving the footprint.

I also decided to start working on a RasPiComm Plus board. It will be bigger and better! But it will not play in the same league pricewise.

But first things first, here are the changes I made:

• Moved the backup battery out of the way. Now it does not collide with the DSI (S2) plug on the Raspberry Pi.
• 5V tolerant inputs
• pluggable terminals for power, RS232 and RS485
• supressor diodes for the outputs. You can now directly connect relays to the outputs
• output is now a pinheader. The RasPiComm focus is on serial communication. Sacrifice I had to made to get the pluggable terminal headers in.
• Extra 2 pin header for 5V fan. In case you want active cooling on the Raspberry Pi
• Changed the through-hole joystick to a SMD variant. That resolves a little issue with the aluminum capacitor of the Raspberry Pi. No need for a tape or PCB support below to prevent accidental joystick activation
• Extra tantal capacitor for external 5V power supply through the power header
• SPI header

Shipment: Since my first post about the RasPiComm about 1 week ago I got a lot of positive feedback, so I really want to push v3 to production soon. Please give me a little time for finding the right partner for that. Eben Upton (Director of the Raspberry Pi foundation) is helping me to get this to Element14 (Farnell), this would be my preferred partner. Thanks Eben for your support! But as they are very busy with the Gertboard right now I don’t know about the timeframe yet. So I am working on it!

And thank you all for all the nice comments on my first blogpost about this! You all keep this going!

Downloads (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License)

RaspiComm_v3_schematics