In this post we’re essentially loading Firmata onto the Pi Co-op and communicating with it using a library called PyMata that speaks the correct serial protocol. I’ve had a quick look on the Firmata github page and I can’t see mention of a C++ library, so you may need to follow the Firmata protocol and write one. This page looks like a useful tutorial for serial port programming in C/C++ under Linux.

Alternatively, if you only need to do fairly simple things with the Pi Co-op then you may be better off writing your own Arduino sketch for the Pi Co-op which uses a very simple serial protocol for communicating with the Pi. This way you wouldn’t have to implement the full Firmata protocol.

Hope that makes sense. Let me know if you need clarification on anything.

Regards

Alan

After giving it some thought, we decided not to try to make the Pi Co-op compatible with shields. Just because a lot of things done by shields (wifi, bluetooth etc) can be done with USB dongles for the Pi. Also, there are a lot of different shields out there, with a lot of different quirks, so it would have been really hard to try and guarantee compatability with all of them.

Hopefully, this won’t prove to be the wrong decision. We’ve tried to focus on ease of use with this board (hence the PyMata tutorial) and for prototyping, we have aligned all of our headers with a 2.54mm grid, so you can easily make custom add-on boards for the Pi Co-op using standard perfboard. See time 1:23 in our youtube video for an example of this.

This also means that if you really needed to, you might be able to use an Arduino protoshield such as this one to create a kind of adaptor for an Arduino shield, but your mileage may vary.

Regards

Alan