Pi-Powered Microcontroller, a Lego Astronaut in RGB Suit
Raspberry Pi and Lego have an extended historical past collectively. Varied makers haven’t solely constructed Raspberry Pi initiatives utilizing Lego bricks, however there’s additionally Raspberry Pi Construct HAT that allows you to management motors and sensors from everybody’s favourite single-board pc. The upcoming FigPi microcontroller takes this unity to the following degree, utilizing Raspberry Pi silicon (a RP2040 processor) on a circuit board that appears similar to a Lego minifig astronaut.
FigPi is the invention of engineer Ben Shockley, who created an analogous microcontroller board known as Mini SAM M4 powered by Atmel SAMD51G19A CPU. The Mini SAM sells the M4 for $25 to $30 on its website. minifigboards.com (opens in new tab) in black, pink, inexperienced, purple or blue colour choices. Shockley has but to disclose the FigPi’s pricing or availability, after mocking the brand new board. Mastodon account.
Very like a basic Lego Area astronaut (or Benny from the Lego motion pictures), the FigPi has a number of enjoyable options, together with a 9-light RGB LED array, a reset button, and two Stemma ports on the again. The motherboard is powered by a microUSB port, additionally situated on the again. The boot button on the entrance is programmable so it might probably serve each its native operate and no matter you select for it.
We have no idea if there can be any GPIO pins, however the image on the entrance (we didn’t see an image on the again) doesn’t present the pin holes. The unique Mini SAM M4 minifig board has 26 GPIO pins as you’ll be able to see within the image beneath when evaluating the 2 boards (Mini SAM M4 is on the left and FigPi is on the fitting).
Like its sibling, FigPi can be programmable in CircuitPython. Shockley addressed Adafruit and its programming language in his put up, saying that he could not have constructed it with out them. CircuitPython permits you to do every thing from controlling lights, motors and sensors to turning your motherboard into an HID system equivalent to a keyboard, mouse or recreation controller.
Rear Stemma ports ought to enable customers to attach a ton of various boards, together with all kinds of sensors.
Along with not having a worth or launch date, we do not have the ultimate specs for the FigPi. Nevertheless, we anticipate it to be out there on the market by Shockley’s website and out there in quite a lot of colours in case it is just like the Mini SAM M4.
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