I’m considering teaching IoT development at a college with the reTerminal. Students will use some analog sensors so an analog to digital converter (ADC) is required and I would like to use Grove system to avoid wiring problems. Is there a Grove Hat that nicely plugs into the reTerminal?
From all the pictures and diagrams, the current Grove Base Hat would “stick out” the side of the reTerminal forming a sort of “L”, which would be awkward to manipulate while looking at the display. A flexible 40 pin cable might be able to connect the current Grove Base Hat to the reTerminal, however, all the available cables I’ve seen are fairly long and would take a lot of room on the student’s work area (imagine a lab with 30 students side-by-side). What would you recommend for using analog Grove sensors with the reTerminal? Thanks!
One option is to de-solder the straight headers on Grove Hat and replace them with the 90-degree headers.
Alternatively, you can design your own PCB that includes all you need.
Depending on what GPIOs do you need to access on reTerminal, you can use the side RPi compatible connector, or even the rear high-speed interface.
I’ve made a post to help anyone planning to design their own rear expansion module board.
@StanleyProjects, thank you very much for the suggestion and excellent documentation on the high-speed interface!
I decided to go for the Grove Base Hat for the Pi and shortest ribbon cable I could source. It’s not ideal but it’s working ok for now. My guess is that in a near future Seeed will sell a Base Hat that uses the high-speed interface so the ribbon cable won’t be necessary.
Cheers!
