We added lots of basic but essential goodies. First up, there's a big prototyping area, half of which is 'breadboard' style and half of which is 'perfboard' style so you can wire up DIP chips, sensors, and the like. Along the edges of the proto area, all the GPIO/I2C/SPI and power pins are broken out to 0.1" stips so you can easily connect to them. On the edges of the prototyping area, all of the breakout pins are also connected to labeled 3.5mm screw-terminal blocks. This makes it easy to semi-permanently wire in sensors, LEDs, etc. There's also a 4-block terminal block broken out to 0.1" pads for general non-GPIO wiring. Finally, we had a little space remaining over the metal connectors so we put in an SOIC surface mount chip breakout area, for those chips that dont come in DIP format.
We added lots of basic but essential goodies. First up, there's a big prototyping area, half of which is 'breadboard' style and half of which is 'perfboard' style so you can wire up DIP chips, sensors, and the like. Along the edges of the proto area, all the GPIO/I2C/SPI and power pins are broken out to 0.1" stips so you can easily connect to them. On the edges of the prototyping area, all of the breakout pins are also connected to labeled 3.5mm screw-terminal blocks. This makes it easy to semi-permanently wire in sensors, LEDs, etc. There's also a 4-block terminal block broken out to 0.1" pads for general non-GPIO wiring. Finally, we had a little space remaining over the metal connectors so we put in an SOIC surface mount chip breakout area, for those chips that dont come in DIP format.
Solder it!
You will also need a soldering iron and solder to assemble the kit
Start by soldering the two corner pins. This will allow you to make sure the plate is aligned properly and fix it if its crooked.
Place the headers in the slots right next to the terminal blocks. You'll want to tape them in place so they don't fall over when you flip the PCB.
User Manual
All the GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output) pins are broken in into two locations. The pins are connected to the 0.1" breakout pins as well as the terminal blocks. The pins are labeled by their 'names' if available and their GPIO # if not. http://elinux.org/Rpi_Low-level_peripherals has a lot more details on what pins can be used for additional purposes (for example, the SPI pins can turn into GPIO's if desired.
There's an SOIC breakout area in the bottom left, handy if you have an SOIC part you want to add. In the bottom right there's a 4-pin terminal block with 4 x 0.1" spaced pads right above it, these are for 'free wiring' - they aren't connected to any GPIO so useful if you want to simply connect some wires or sensors that don't go directly to a GPIO/power pin
If you want have it inside a case, we suggest one of our Adafruit Pi boxes (as long as the top is removed)
Downloads
Files
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Designed by Limor Fried/Ladyada for Adafruit Industries. CERN OPEN HARDWARE LICENCE v1.1 http://www.ohwr.org/
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This guide was first published on Jul 29, 2012. It was last updated on Oct 10, 2016.