Hi,
I'm currently re-wiring the Pi Zero Qwerty Hat board, with Arduino adapters on the left side, because Pi's Serial is on the left side of the GPIO header.
In the meantime, I need to decide what are going to be components of my Pocket Zero device. I want it to be portable and as small as possible at the same time powerfull.
So, for good and portable Arduino programming, what do we need?
- Full Keyboard (it's somewhat complicated on touch keyboards)
- FTDI/Serial connection
- Chip Programming device (preferably, to work with bare-bone chips)
- A monitor
- Power for our Pi (preferably with charging)
- USB hub (which in some case could be all we need)
In a signle hat we cannot fit everything. So I need to group them by priority.
- FTDI/Serial First - if you have it you can already do anything you need with help of your Smartphone
- Power. If you have power - you don't need to bother how to power your Pi and Arduino
- USB Hub. It's easier to connect your smartphone or Bluetooth or WiFi, or even Arudino via stand-alone FTDI
- Keyboard. I feel like real programming cannot be done with reduced or touch keyboard
Montior and ASP Kind of nice to have.
Now an interesting facts:
- If you combine Power+USBHub, you don't need FTDI and you can live without Keyboard
- If you add FTDI and keyboard it's a perfect match.
But there simply not that much space on a Zero hat to put them all together.
So, my thought right now is the following:
- Bottom hat. Power (based on LiPo Rider) + USB hub (reduced to 2 or 3 ports). This hat doesn't need to use GPIO header
- Top hat. Keyboard + FTDI/serial (this is already in Eagle and under testing)
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