What is it?

Hardware compatibility is hard. The Grove system enables a lot more of that between maker-focused perpherials than it was possible ever before. Arduinos, Intel Edison and Galileo, BeagleBone (Black and Green), LinkIt One and a lot more devices can re-use things like sensors, input/output devices, physical computing.

GroveHat is a small break-out board to enabled Grove compatibility on the VIA VAB-820 embedded computing board. It makes 2x Digital I/O and 2x I2C ports available, both from Linux and Android!

Technical Specs

The board breaks out the 5V power (so don't use it with ICs that work on 3.3V only!).

For digital I/O, digital channels D1/D2 and D8/D9 are broken out. Using the regular Grove connectors, their pinout makes only D1 and D8 are accessible, but with custom made boards you can have 4 digital channels!

For I2C, the I2C3 bus (/dev/i2c-2 in Linux) is accessible through two connectors.

On Android, the Digital I/O and I2C devices are accessible through the VIA Smart ETK, which expands the stock Android with various functions needed for embedded computing. (Tutorials to use that are in the works!)

Why did I make it?

Any ecosystem is only as good as the amount of support and variety of participants it has. While Grove is not perfect, it's the best hardware compatibility platform for peripheral reuse yet! I hope I can add to this ecosystem by bringing it to more hardware, such as this (pretty heavyweight) embedded board!

What makes it special?

As of now I don't know any other commercial grade embedded devices, nor any Android devices that are Grove compatible! (If you do, please let me know at gergely@moonpunch.org)

Get a VIA VAB-820

Get the VIA VAB-820 that this breakout board was made for, from the Embedded Store.

License

The board is released under the CERN Open Hardware License 1.2

Featured

• Grove Comes to Embedded on the VIA tech blog