Ah, OK, Now I Got you. Yeah, you can get the PWM right from the Pi, my bad.
As long as the Hat/pHat doesn’t use the PWM pin at least, which I don’t think it does.
Would this be of any benefit? https://www.adafruit.com/product/757 I used it in one of my projects to drive some of those big 10 mm LEDS from my raspberry Pi. The Pi’s 3.3 V GPIO feeds in on the low voltage side and +5V drives my LEDS with resistors on the high voltage side. 3.3V is iffy with those large LEDS, especially the Blue ones. Keeps the current draw from Pi’s GPIO nice a low too. The +5V that drives the LEDS comes right from my power supply, not from the PI.
Looks pretty nice! The only thing is that is states
The 10K’s do make the interface a little more sluggish
The HC-SR04 is already giving me timing problems, like variables being read before assignment etc. Changing interface speeds might be a lot more effort.
There is also this one, https://www.adafruit.com/product/395 I used the other one because I was driving LEDs and wanted the Darlington’s. It saved me from building my own board, which would have been a lot bigger. lol, mine is soldered to a perf (Perma Proto) board that has the LED’s and series resistors on it.
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Ah, much better, danke!
I’m definitely going to look at getting one of those Proto bonnets for future Explorer pHat (and other) projects, so I’ll add this to my list too.
It’d be nice if it was sold by a UK re-seller that I’ve used before, but alas, Pimoroni don’t stock it. A quick Google search finds a place called “coolcomponents” selling them for a similar price(https://www.coolcomponents.co.uk/en/8-channel-bi-directional-logic-level-converter-txb0108.html), but I’ve never bought from them before, so I can’t comment on shipping etc.
Since the sensor is (sorta) working on the slap-dash resistor rig I have hooked up at the moment, I wonder if something like this might do the trick… https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/sparkfun-logic-level-converter-bi-directional
Though, Pimoroni peeps, another handy Adafruit board might be nice. ;)
I have a cheap version of that logic level converter (that I got from ebay), I’m using it to convert an optical sensor from a mouse (that uses something approximating I2C) from 5V to a Pi-friendly 3V3 and it seems to work fine! In fact I just soldered it straight onto my custom PCB to save space:
That second sparkfun link looks like an almost identical board to the first one I linked too. That first Adaruit board I linked to that I used. Looks like it has the same 10 resistors on it for pull ups. It’s only 3 dollars so if your already ordering something, just take it on.
Just ordered another Proto Bonnet and Proto hat, I was ordering some other stuff anyway. I’m in Canada and order from Adafruit and Pimoroni. Each of them selling some of the others wares has saved me from having to make two orders a few times. Getting it from the UK or US doesn’t really make all that much difference to me. Only paying the one shipping charge is nice though.
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I’m just re-making a nice wooden holder for the electronics of my Zumo chassis and then I shall upload some images of the prototypes for you people.
I realise I have started a thread and never really posted what it was inevitably for!
And finally. the images I promised!
You can find the other two images here, since they’re all quite large…