4Tronix

PiStop - Traffic Light Add-on for Raspberry Pi

Regular price $6.10

In stock

The Pi-Stop is a low cost hardware module designed to allow Raspberry Pi users to take their first steps into interfacing with the real world.

Designed with the learning in mind, everyone will recognise and identify its familiar elements encouraging their use along-side their own projects.

See this independent review

Move past the Stop light

The Pi-Stop is designed to remove many of the common hurdles people are faced with when getting started using hardware with the Raspberry Pi. Often it is difficult to know what components to use and how to connect them, the Pi-Stop makes it simple by plugging directly onto pre-set positions on the Raspberry GPIO connector.

By plugging the Pi-Stop directly on to the Raspberry Pi GPIO header, no extra cables or wires are needed. Unlike many other add-on boards, they do not block unused GPIO pins, keeping them open for other uses. The Pi-Stop can be fitted in 4 standard locations, allowing up to four Pi-Stops to be controlled independently or combined with other hardware.

Prepare to go!

The Pi-Stop provides a simple stepping stone, between pure screen based programming and using physical hardware to interact with the real world. Components like the Pi-Stop will provide a flexible and non-restrictive way to build understanding through experimenting.

Since it is only a step away from a bag of components, it also allows the programming of hardware to be introduced, and the electronics involved can be introduced separately, if desired. Allowing the pupils to discover they can control real things, and then again to discover they can also build their own circuits and control them in exactly the same way.

Often, people are faced with a magic board which they plug in and tell it to do stuff, however it isn't always clear to them why or how it does it. By providing something which they can remove and replace with something (apparently) completely different (- wires, breadboards and LEDs) they will be able to understand the link.

By keeping the hardware very simple, it allows better understanding of what is happening, and allows space to come up with your own projects and apply the concepts with your own ideas in mind.

GO Full throttle

The documentation and guides are openly available for the Pi-Stop for educational use. There will be guides, tutorials and workshop material available all of which can be taken as is[available as PDF format] or adapted to your own needs [available in markdown format].

It is encouraged that similar materials can be submitted back for others also to share and make use of.

The materials will demonstrate the concepts, methods and provide the building blocks to explore ideas and take learning further by with creative projects, activities and games.

NOTE: This item consists of a single Pi-Stop with red, orange, and green surface-mount LEDs. The photos show examples of what can be done by combining multiple Pi-Stops, or using the 4-Pi-Stop Kit.

Pi-Stop Documentation

The following material is available (in both PDF and markdown format):

Customer Reviews

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Visual alert of important or fun things with PiStop

What a great little traffic light thingy. You couldn't (well, I couldn't and my learned techy friends couldn't either) build for $6.10 AUS.
This little plug in your Raspberry Pi or similar development boards such as the Wemos D32 (of course not directly plugged in like the Pi allows but..)
Within a minute I had the little PiStop plugged into the Pi, a quick Python script and had little traffic lights flashing on and off.

For my elder getting deaf friend, in an hour I had the red LED responding when he got a SPAM email, amber that its not SPAM but its not important and green when its an email matching his important contacts. He now only has to glance at his Pi and see what emails he has. Five minutes later, had the LEDS flashing to the number of emails in the above group.
How's that for a quick real world use.

Get one (actually get two if like me, you have elder techy friends who have glue for fingers...) you'll love it.

Well done SmallDevices getting these on your web sites What's New page. Wouldn't have known about them if you hadn't.

Cheers,


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