When you own a Raspberry Pi, there is so much you can do with it. However, combine the bare Raspberry Pi with some attachments, and you have a gadget that could far exceed your expectations. Presented here are some of the more useful attachments, which will increase your expectations from the Raspberry Pi.
LCD Option from 4D
When you want to exploit the full HD capabilities of the Raspberry Pi, give it the color LCD options from 4D Systems. The company’s EVE (Extensible Virtual Engine) that is featured by the “Picasso Processor” drives the 480×272 pixels on the TFT Screen of the 4.3-inch “uLCD-43-PT-Pi”. This gives you 65,000 true to live colors on a 4.3-inch diagonal screen. The 4.3-inch screen is notable for its resistive touch layer, which can sense both finger as well as stylus interaction.
When you are going portable with your Raspberry Pi, this screen will be absolutely essential. To connect with the Raspberry Pi, this series of LCD screens from 4D has a “4D Serial Pi Adapter” that connects to the GPIO port of the Raspberry Pi board, through a 5-way cable adapter. The best feature of this adapter is it does not hog all the GPIO port, but allows for duplication of the GPIO lines, so that you can stack another board on top.
AlaMode
A team of like-minded students and engineers has made the AlaMode board that has some special features. Working off the Raspberry Pi GPIO port, AlaMode is a stackable board compatible with Arduino. The goal of the Wyolem Team was to provide the Raspberry Pi and its user’s access to the vast library, devices and “Shield” expansion boards available for the Arduino and its community. This allows you the complete freedom to program the Raspberry Pi in any language you prefer and control the Arduino or the AlaMode directly.
The AlaMode takes its power directly from the Raspberry Pi, or you can power it separately from USB, wall-mart or external batteries. For application memory support or for data logging, a micro-SD card slot is added. You also have a real-time clock (DS3234), which reports its time back to the Raspberry Pi, thus removing the necessity to program two clocks.
You can even connect a Fastrax UP501 GPS receiver module on the AlaMode. This opens up the Raspberry Pi to the expanding stackable shields of the Arduino.
LCD & Keypad Kit
