$25 Expansion Board for the Raspberry Pi

There are already several expansion boards for the Raspberry Pi such as the Gertboard or RaspiComm, but none of them originated from China. Onebir spotted a new expansion board from a Chinese supplier on Aliexpress that’s available for $25 including shipping.

There’s no description on the seller website, the seller provided us some details in Chinese. With Google translate help, the key features of the board(s) can be summarized as follows:

3.3V / 5V SPI interface
3.3V / 5V I2C interface
Opto-isolator for GPIOs supporting 8-channel 50V/600mA to control motors, drive LEDs, etc…
Power LED (The pictures are crap, but I can’t see any LEDs on the boards)
External power fuse to protect the expansion board and the Raspberry Pi.

The features in Chinese are shown below in case something was lost in translation:

1.全尺寸完美兼容树莓派，
2.将3.3V的SPI接口转换为通用的5V SPI接口（并且可以通过P13跳线切换回3.3V）
3.将3.3V的I2C接口转换为通用的5V I2C接口（并且可以通过P13跳线切换回3.3V）
4.GPIO放弃光耦隔离方式，采用芯片驱动，支持8路50V、600mA的高电压大电流驱动，意味着可以直接连接舵机，驱动LED等等（要做小车，机器人，智能家居，远程控制的必备哟）芯片采用插座方式，不小心烧坏以后方便更换
5.增加LED电源灯
6.外接电源使用保险丝，更好的保护你的扩展板和树莓派

I’m not even sure this “expansion kit” includes the 2 boards pictured above, and questions about software support remained unanswered. Beyond the total lack of information, although the seller has good ratings he is relatively new, so only people willing to risk $25 should give it a try.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.