PiFace development

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.

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.

"...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).