Balboa And Raspberry Pi

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1

Hi,

I’m having trouble with the integration with the raspberry pi and balboa. I was able to get the I2C connection in place using the pololu-rpi-slave-arduino-library but then I lose the ability to communicate with the IC2 devices from the Balboa board. I tried making them both bus masters but that repeatedly crashed after a minute or so. I’m pretty sure it’s due to the bug in the I2C hardware implementation on the pi since I had to revert to using the regular arduino Wire library.

What I’m after is to let the balboa board deal with all the low level stuff, such as reading the gyro, accelerometer, controlling the tilt angle etc, and let the pi deal with navigation, and external controls.

Is there an alternative to I2C for communication between the pi and the balboa? I see that there are some General-purpose level shifters listed in the docs but have no idea on how to use them. Could I set up a serial connection or some other TWI between the Pi and the Balboa? Is there another option or other pins that are shared that I can use?

Thanks,

Chris

2

Hello, Chris.

The TTL serial pins on the Balboa (0 and 1) are unused by default. It should be possible to connect those to the TTL serial pins on the Raspberry Pi GPIO header (through a level shifter), though those Raspberry Pi pins are not broken out anywhere else on the Balboa board. You might be able to solder some wires directly to the exposed header pins on the underside of the Balboa board. Also, you might need to change some of the configuration settings on the Raspberry Pi to get rid of unwanted serial output.

Alternatively, you might be able to connect the Balboa to the Raspberry pi over USB.

-Nathan