Lots of Pots (LOP) Board for Raspberry Pi

This shield comes with an 8 channel analog to digital converter for reading potentiometers or sensors, and breaks out the GPIO pins and communication pins in a useful configuration. We wanted this board as an interface for making virtual synthesizers on the Raspberry Pi, but it will work well for other analog input sensors as well if you populate the board with headers instead of pots. If you’ve got a project that requires several analog and digital inputs, this board will save you a lot of time stripping wires and fussing with protoboard.

The features of the LOP board include:

• Eight 10-bit analog inputs via a MCP3008 analog to digital converter, connected to the Raspberry Pi’s hardware SPI interface.
• Four momentary switches hooked up to GPIO pins with pull up resistors and hardware debouncing so you don’t have to worry about it in software.
• A 6-pin header for accessing the serial console with a USB BUB or an FTDI cable.
• A four pin header for the I2C pins, power and ground for easy connection of I2C sensor boards.
• The remaining 10 GPIO pins are broken out in a 10×3 header block with rails for power and ground, for easy wiring of switches or other devices.
• An onboard 300mA MCP1802 voltage regulator to provide more power on the 3.3V line (the Raspberry Pi header only provides 50mA on the 3.3V pin).

You can get the LOP Board with or without the potentiometers (if you choose the latter you’ll get some male headers instead). The potentiometers are 10k linear taper ALPS pots and we’re offering them at the same price you could buy them in small quantities from Mouser. The pots aren’t soldered to the board, for maximum flexibility. We will also send them fully assembled and soldered for a small labor fee.

Resources

• Using the Analog Inputs on the Lots Of Pots Board
• LotsOfPotsSchematic.pdf