The Raspberry Ladder is a small kit comprising PCB with LEDs, resistors and switches intended to be used to experiment with the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO functions and hopefully to get people interested in soldering up their own projects. Soldering is not difficult and it’s a good skill to learn if you are keen to learn more about electronics. (or repairing jewelry!)

The Raspberry Ladder Board

The kit is quite easy to assemble and to help you put it together, I’ve made a video demonstrating a board being soldered and tested.

The Raspberry Ladder was featured in the November issue if the MagPi Magazine – please read the original article if you can – it has details of the assembly process as well as a picture or 2.

Click here for the assembly video via YouTube.

Please Buy the kit from Tandy in the UK

So what can we do with 10 LEDs and 4 switches? quite a lot, I hope. This blog entry is just a taster page for it all – software supplied which you can download includes a simple test program (to make sure it’s working OK!), a version of the ladder program which was the inspiration for this board, the Tuxx Crossing simulator, and some new programs – A version of the “Simon” game, and a reaction tester. These programs are written using Bash Scripting, C and BASIC – and I’ll welcome some contributions written in Python, Scratch, or anything else you may care to use!

For more details of the software to drive the board, please see this page.