The Raspberry Pi is an amazing little piece of hardware. Essentially, a $35 PC. However, when it comes to the Internet of Things and connecting sensors and control modules, it falls a little short. Its male pins are not easy to wire, the pins are not 5V tolerant, there are no PWM outputs and there are no Analog inputs. This is true for both the original Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi 2.
Thanks to the all new FEZ Utility, connecting all kinds of sensors and devices couldn’t be easier!
Key Features:
[ol]All Raspberry Pi’s original pins are exposed (and labeled) on female headers.
13 5V-tolerant GPIO pins.
14 PWM outputs.
8 Analog Inputs.
4 LEDs, 2 of them are PWM ready for dimming.[/ol]
The FEZ Utility is compatible with Raspberry PI 2 model B and Raspberry PI 1 model B+. Complete drivers are provided for Windows 10 but Linux can work as well.
If you are planning on connecting anything to your Raspberry Pi besides a USB cable then you must own the very versatile FEZ Utility HAT.
Truth, truth … but it was a perfect timing otherwise my wife would never let me order this magnitude of things (she was on a vacation with the kids and I was left home alone to get work done, now she knows it should never happen again … :snooty: )
To me the Hat is more about being able to tinker in a self contained package, so you get buttons, lights, sensors, controllers, etc.
The Cream is something for someone who just wants a nice easy way to connect their existing stuff to the Pi without all the work of handling voltage checks and basic interfacing.
@ mtylerjr - Typo, I meant the utility. The Cream is for connecting Gadgeteer, obviously. Essentially the Cream and the Utility are the same concept, but Cream for Gadgeteer modules and Utility for generic ones.
FEZ HAT has motor and servo drivers, for one. Yes, you can drive servos with PWM, but having the terminals exposed is a nice convenience. Add in the sensors, and you have a nice all-in-one board for building robots without adding a bunch of stuff. Plop a Pi with FEZ HAT onto a chassis, and go to town.
I see FEZ Utility as being more about making it easier to get to the I/O ports on the Pi, as well as having access to stuff the Pi doesn’t offer natively. The fact that all the pins are actually LABELED will be enough to ensure it’s popularity.
If I understand correctly, the I/O pins are passthrough to one of the pin blocks on the top. So you wouldn’t be able to add another HAT, but you can get to all the pins.
Are you saying there’s a header on the bottom of the board (that none of the images show so far) ? If so then it makes more sense but a picture of it mounted would alleviate all concerns.
@ mtylerjr the additional header block is the bit that takes extra space, so I can understand why it’s a different size.
