Pi Crust: Connect things to your Rasperry Pi

This is awesome. However, it looks like this is just a breakout board. So you are still connecting stuff directly to the broadcom ARM chip. Which means it would be pretty easy to damage it.<p>"GPIO voltage levels are 3.3 V and are not 5 V tolerant. There is no over-voltage protection on the board - the intention is that people interested in serious interfacing will use an external board with buffers, level conversion and analog I/O rather than soldering directly onto the main board." <a href="http://elinux.org/RPi_Low-level_peripherals" rel="nofollow">http://elinux.org/RPi_Low-level_peripherals</a>

I still wish they had included a few analog inputs and outputs to make it easier to use with sensors. Without that, you basically <i>have</i> to connect it to an Arduino or similar to do anything interesting. It seems kind of wasteful to use the Arduino just for sampling the analog signals and forwarding the data to a more powerful ARM board.

For those too lazy to RTFA, very cool in that it is an open source design and parts list rather than a for-sale/profit part.<p>One big plus seems to be cheap/easy duplication of GND and V+ pins.

A few updates:<p>OSHPark now sells the bare PCB for $4.60: <a href="http://store.oshpark.com/products/pi-crust-v4" rel="nofollow">http://store.oshpark.com/products/pi-crust-v4</a><p>There's a Google Group to discuss ideas, etc: <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/picrust" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/picrust</a>

Hi, Great idea, and nice to see a list of supplier links. However, mouser want $39 shipping on the connector (I'm in Australia). I can't find the connector at RS nor element14. Any other ideas??

Does anyone know of a cheap electrical meter that you can hook up to the Pi to get wattage readings?

Only one UART :-(