Breakout Garden for Raspberry Pi 400

Now at the right angle for the Raspberry Pi 400! A simple, solderless, interchangeable way to use breakouts with your Raspberry Pi 400 - just plug up to three Pimoroni breakouts (2 x I2C, 1 x SPI) into the slots and start programming and creating!

Breakout Garden plugs into the GPIO pins of your shiny new Pi 400 and allows you to connect up to three of our extensive range of Pimoroni breakouts so they conveniently point towards you and in the right direction. We've got environmental sensors so you can keep an eye on the temperature and humidity in your office, a whole bunch of little screens for important notifications, displays and GIFs, and of course LEDs (the Pi 400 is great, but needs more LEDs, right? ).

The three sturdy black slots are edge connectors that connect the breakouts to the pins on your Raspberry Pi. There is one slot for SPI breakouts, and two for I2C breakouts. As I2C is a bus, you can use multiple I2C devices at the same time, provided they don't have the same I2C address (we've made sure all our breakouts have different addresses, and we print them on the back of the breakouts so they're easy to find).

Breakout Garden is not only a handy way to add functionality to your Pi 400, but also very useful for prototyping without complicated wiring, soldering or breadboards, and you can expand or change your setup at any time.

Please note that the breakouts are sold separately!

Features

• Three robust slots for Pimoroni breakouts
• 2x I2C slots (5 pins)
• 1x SPI slot (7 pins)
• 0.1" pitch, 5 or 7-pin connectors
• Broken out pins
• Reverse polarity protection (built into breakouts)
• Exclusive right-angled format for the Pi 400

Using Breakout Garden

Because of the way I2C (the protocol that Breakout Garden uses) works, it doesn't matter which slot of the Breakout Garden you plug your breakout into. Each I2C device has an address (which you can see on the back of the Breakout Garden) that it uses to identify itself to other I2C devices, so it basically tells your Raspberry Pi, "Hey, it's me, Bob!"

SPI is a faster, higher throughput protocol for communicating with devices like displays. The Breakout Garden Mini's SPI slot uses Chip Select 1 (BCM 7) and BCM 19 for the GPIO pin (for things like LCD backlighting).

We've built reverse polarity protection into our Pimoroni breakouts, which means there's no magic blue smoke if you accidentally plug one in the wrong way round. The correct way to plug them in is to make sure the labels on the pins on your breakout and the labels on each Breakout Garden 400 slot match.

We've also broken out a lot of useful pins on the top of the Breakout Garden Mini so you can connect and integrate other devices into your Breakout Garden projects. If you have Pimoroni breakouts that you've already soldered headers to, then you can use this top row of pins to use alongside other breakouts on Breakout Garden Mini.

Software

As a first port of call, we recommend visiting the shop pages of the breakouts you're using - there you'll find a link to the Python library and installation instructions. corresponding breakouts installed. We also have

Alternatively, you can go to the Breakout Garden GitHub repo and try our automatic installer. Just put a few breakouts into Breakout Garden 400, run the installer and SHAZAM! will install the software for the corresponding breakouts. We also have some nice examples to show you what's possible.