The Adafruit ADA801 Prototyping Pi Plate Kit is the next best purchase if you've finally got your hands on a Raspberry Pi, and you're itching to make some fun embedded computer projects with it. This Pi Plate from Adafruit, can snap onto the Pi PCB and give you all sorts of prototyping goodness to make building on top of the Pi super easy. Adafruit designed this board to be a tinkerer's best friend, by adding a big prototyping area, half of which is 'breadboard' style and half of which is 'perfboard' style. This allows you to easily wire up DIP chips, sensors, and more. Along the edges of the proto area, all the GPIO/I2C/SPI and power pins are broken out into 0.1" strips so you can easily connect to them. On the edges of the prototyping area, the breakout pins are connected to labelled 3.5mm screw-terminal blocks. This makes it easy to semi-permanently wire in sensors and LEDs. There is also a 4-block terminal block broken out into 0.1" pads for general non-GPIO wiring. Finally, over the metal connectors, there is a SOIC surface mount chip breakout area, for those chips that do not come in DIP format. This kit comes as a set of parts, meaning a little soldering is required to put it together but it's really easy, even a beginner can do it in 15-20 minutes or so. Adafruit's Pi plate is a great step forward in enhancing or establishing your prototyping and soldering skills. |
