With the PiMuxClock work going well I decided it was time to experiment a little with my RasPiO Duino board. I built it with some enthusiasm a few weeks ago but did not get passed the blinking LED test.

In truth the whole Arduino world has somewhat passed me by, as to me it is squashed between PIC’s at the bottom and Raspberry Pi’s at the top – too complex and expensive for simple low level embedded stuff but lacking the built in bits like HD video which makes the Raspberry Pi great.

Well anyway the RaspPiO Duino board Kickstarter seemed like a good opportunity to see what the Arduino is all about.  The Duino is a great concept for me as it gives me a self-contained Arduino development  ‘workbench’ within my existing Raspberry Pi setup. As you can see I have progressed to getting an LCD interface working, and I have to say the Duino has been great from build, through setup, with an excellent set of examples to get you started.

So far I have just scratched the surface but I can see the big win for me is most likely going to be using the Arduino in combination with a Raspberry Pi. For instance the Arduino is well suited to reliable autonomous low level data collection and control type work, while the Pi can play to it’s strengths interrogating it and passing processed data back to the wider world.  I have done this in the past with a PIC but the problematic bit tends to be getting the information from the PIC to the Raspberry Pi. PIC’s have the capability but unless you want to get into quite complex low level programming you are forced down the Matrix ‘FlowCode’ type product route which is relatively expensive compared to the freely available Arduino resources.  I can see a combined Arduino / Raspberry Pi Mark3 chicken heater this winter ….