Some time ago I have been contacted by Leon Anavi which offered me to have a closer look at his RabbitMax Flex. I received the board from Bulgaria in no time and got busy almost immediately to get my hands on what I found to be a really nice board.
It includes:
- Relay
- IR LED
- IR photo sensor
- Buzzer
- Button
- RGB LED
- Slot for modular LCD character display
- Slots for up to 5 plug and play I2C sensors
Leon is a software engineer and he has not only produced a well designed hat for the Raspberry Pi but he is setting up a solid base for a project that aspire to help you getting on the IoT bandwagon with little effort and a lot of support from plenty of documentation, nicely written code base and much more to come.
He is also working on a custom GNU/Linux distribution for RabbitMax which is built using the Yocto Project and Opeembedded and features application that controls the HAT and sends data from the sensors through the lightweight machine to machine communication protocol MQTT. His goal is to be able to control the HAT remotely through a user friendly web interface and of course keep everything under the free and open source software umbrella.
This is a project worth supporting and I wish for it a very successful crowdfunding campaign as soon as Leon feels the time is right.
Some useful resources on how to get started:
- User’s manual: http://rabbitmax.com/files/rabbitmax-flex.pdf
- Open source sample applications in Python and C: https://github.com/RabbitMax/rabbitmax-examples
- Official website: http://rabbitmax.com/