If you have a Raspberry Pi you might want to get your a Gertboard – read on for more.
What’s a Gerboard you may ask? This is what Liz over at Raspberry Pi said:
If you want to use your Raspberry Pi to drive motors to open doors, lift things, or power robotics; if you want to sense temperature and switch devices on and off; if you want to flash lights; if you want to teach it to play the glockenspiel; or if you want to learn about electronics from scratch, then Gertboard is for you. (This is the stuff I’m talking about when I blither on about physical computing here.) It comes with an assembly manual and a user manual (both of the above are direct download links to PDFs), which also act as a pair of teaching guides, bundled with plenty of programs to show you how to put things together.
Gertboard is packaged as a kit. It doesn’t come preassembled; you will have to solder it together yourself. Soldering is easy, as we’ve said before (seriously – if I can solder, so can you), and we encourage you to have a go. If you make mistakes they’re easy to correct, and once you’ve finished building your Gertboard you’ll have a very useful piece of hardware, a new skill, and a lovely warm sense of achievement.
Gertboard isn’t an official Raspberry Pi Foundation product, but it’s designed and produced by someone who’s right at the heart of the Foundation, it fits the Foundation’s goals perfectly, and we endorse it wholeheartedly; we hope to see lots of kids using it as a learning platform along with the Raspberry Pi. Go and preorder one now (lead times should be short); they’re only £30, and I predict they’re going to go like hot cakes.
And here is a picture of the man himself.
Have you ordered one? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Check out what happened at the Q&A session with the Raspberry Pi Foundation