Expanding Functionality

Caution

Although the I2C and UART are connected to the Raspberry Pi, they operate at 5.1V not 3.3V. Check that your devices are compatible first!

I2C

I2C is a great way to a components to your BrainBox. Look at the datasheet for your device which you would like to connect and connect the SDA and SDL to the appropriate pins. You should now be able to send data to your device by using the SMBus2 python library.

Caution

You should avoid address 0x08 (8) and 0x68 (104) because these are used by critical system components.

If you are interested in the I2C protocol there is a good guide to find out more about how it works here.

USB

You can use USB devices using the serial library. The connection will probably open on something similar to dev/ttyUSB0 but if you can’t find it where you expect then connect the device to a Raspberry Pi running a recent OS image and observe where it appears.

UART

UART is not enabled by default on the BrainBox and you will need to ask on the forums for us to provide a patch to enable it should you wish to use it.

Note

Please contact us for more infomation if you wish to expand your BrainBox.