Raspberry Pi GPIO board

I discovered this board beginning 2012. I was looking for such a board since a long time (Panda board, beagle board…) But I always hesitate because these board are quite expensive, and also because I am not so familiar with Linux.

So when this board was available I bought one and tried to play with it. Then I discovered an fantastic job made by Raspberry Pi community : Pi4j. With that, this is possible to easy program a Raspberry Pi board using Java. This is what I was looking for a long time.

Knowing all of this, I decided to create an extension board for Raspberry Pi. I know there is now some available, but none of them suits my requirements.

I created a first version, but it has some issues, I won’t speak about that one… but using the background work of the first board I improved it to get RaspExt board.

The best I think is to start by schematic :

With RaspExt, we have :

64 I/O at 5V level
1 RS 232 port 12V level
1 serial port 3.3V level
2 I2C port at 5V level
1 RTC using a DS3231
GSM connection with a SIM900 module
1 extra port for a RF module

Connectors P1 to P5 are using the same scheme as the shutter automation board. So this board can be directly connected to these boards.

Board :