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Sneak preview from the Akafugu labs: VFD Modular Clock: Raspberry PI Edition

Here's a brand new board we're working on: A version of our VFD Modular Clock that plugs in on top of a Raspberry PI as a shield. It is the perfect way to bling up your Raspberry Pi, by adding an attractive retro VFD display on top!

It comes with an on-board co-processor in the form of an Attiny4313 that takes care of driving the display shield, and makes sure that the display can run flawlessly even when the system load of the Raspberry PI is high.

You communicate with it using hardware SPI, and we're writing code for it in Python, making it very easy to talk to!

The most obvious thing to do is of course to show time, but with all the power of the Raspberry Pi at your fingertips, you can display all sorts of other information, such as the system load, uptime, display information from your facebook or twitter or use it as a quick display for other hardware devices you have attached to your RPi.

To make the board friendly to hardware hackers, we've added a 16-bit I2C GPIO expander, giving you easy access to 16 5V IO ports. (In the picture below, you can see the space for the chip in the top left).