Cananka, the Raspberry Pi HAT

[This the first post in the series.]

As I got myself a Raspberry Pi, I started thinking about connecting some electronics to it. And in Raspberry world you can either just connect some wires to connector or go about making a HAT.

Raspberry Pi HAT specification defines both mechanical properties and a minimum of electronics while still allowing you to do whatever you please with available IO. Pretty much the only strict requirements here are board size (65x56 mm), hole placement, and presence of a special EEPROM with board identification data. A bit more complicated than bare wiring but simple enough.

Armed with knowledge of what’s needed, I had to decide what I’ll actually make. As I played a lot with CAN bus lately, it seemed as a reasonable choice. Not only I go with something familiar on a first try but I get to connect it to the rest of my humble CAN bus world.

Early into the project one has to decide on a name. In this case the name was obvious - Canberry. Unfortunately it was obvious to someone else too as there is already a project with that name. Lesser man would give up here as not only the name is taken but it is taken by a really similar project. However, project is not exactly the same and differences will make exercise worth-while.

With the preferred name taken, choice fell onto CanPi. Guess what - there is also project named CANPi out there. One guess at what it is about. :)

For a while I’ve settled onto Can314 and actually used it for a few days in my notes until, unrelated to electronics, I was playing with Red Hat. Suddenly its younger sister Fedora came to mind. As fedora is type of hat, what else to call Raspberry Pi HAT than Candora. Name seemed good for a while but I wasn’t completely happy.

However, now I had an idea. With the help of Wikipedia hat page I’ve came upon a few other names inspired by hats: Canbeen, Canullo, Canetto, Canouch… just to name a few.

But at the end Cananka, a name based upon Russian ushanka hat, won. Not only it is easy to pronounce but Google only finds 7100 matching pages.

With the name selected, onto the requirements.