PiFace development

OutsourcedGuru · April 1, 2019, 10:35pm

I bought a Raspberry PiFace Digital 2 board and thought I'd play around with it by creating an OctoPrint plugin to support it.

PiFace

Not sure how I want to present all this to the user. I'm guessing that it might be interesting to later allow some sort of Scratch-like or ladder programming to it.

It would be good to know of some use cases you might envision.

It's got eight open-collector outputs (eight LEDs and two relays within that space), eight inputs (four push buttons within that space). It can be powered by the Raspi; it can provide power to the Raspi or there can be split power as well. There's a mode so that the outputs can be above 5V.

kurtnelle · April 2, 2019, 4:20am

Present the user with a UI that has a top down image of the device and then has toggle buttons pointing the the various relays, leds and other functions of the device. If its a toggle thing, then show a toggle button. If it's a range value then put a knob or a slider. If it's a sensor thing, then display the value. Make it easy for them to translate what they saw on the board to what they can do on the screen.

OutsourcedGuru · April 2, 2019, 4:47pm

"...like the emulator software does."

Yeah, I guess that's a good idea. I was thinking something like the way NodeRed works (ladder programming style).