Pimoroni Breakout Garden
Les Pounder once tried to grow a Raspberry bush by planting a Raspberry Pi in his garden. Hopefully, this type of garden will bear more fruit!
Les Pounder once tried to grow a Raspberry bush by planting a Raspberry Pi in his garden. Hopefully this type of garden will bear more fruit!
No soil or books are required to grow the Breakout Garden from Pimoroni. It’s designed to work with all 40-pin GPIO models of Raspberry Pi, fits on top of the Pi and uses the HAT standard to ensure a secure connection thanks to the provided standoffs and screws. In essence, the Breakout Garden is really just a six-port I2C expander that doesn’t require any soldering. For those unfamiliar with I2C, it’s a connection protocol where devices can be chained together, yet be accessed independently thanks to an address system that tells the Raspberry Pi where each device is connected.
The Breakout Garden has six slots designed to accept one of the new range of Breakout boards from Pimoroni. Each slot has reverse polarity protection, so if a breakout board is inserted incorrectly, it won’t damage your Pi. The slots also grip the breakout boards with enough force to ensure they’re solid, yet easy to remove. The slots are also rugged enough and not loosened with wiggling or force. Behind these slots are a row of GPIO pins that enable connection using raw GPIO, I2C, SPI and UART, which is handy because this board blocks access to the GPIO.
Software installation for the Breakout Garden is relatively straightforward, after downloading an archive from a GitHub repo. At the time of writing there’s no oneline installer, but we’ve raised this with Pimoroni and it should be addressed in the future.
Once installed we next insert the breakout boards into the slots and run the install.sh file. This will detect all of the breakout boards in the slot, and then interactively install the necessary Python 3 libraries for each board. In our test the install didn’t work for more than one board at a time, an issue we raised via the Github issues tracker for the project and which was fixed in a matter of hours.
So the Breakout Garden has been planted with our breakout boards, and at the time of writing there are six compatible boards on offer. First we see the MLX90640 Thermal Camera (reviewed in LXF242), then an OLED screen, which when combined with the VL53L1X laser distance sensor can be used to create a neat parking sensor and display. By using the OLED with the LSM303D eCompass we can create a responsive and educational seismograph, sensitive enough to detect the slightest rumble. The BME680 provides a temperature sensor and air quality sensor which again can be used with the OLED screen to create a basic weather station. The last compatible sensor is a BH1745 colour sensor that can be used to read the colour of an object and this can also be used with the OLED. All of these sensors have been designed to work with the Breakout Garden, and range in price from £9 to £54 for the thermal camera.
At £12 the Breakout Garden is good value, but it’s nothing without the breakout sensors and boards. So purchasing breakouts will add to the initial cost. The flexibility of the Breakout Garden, in that we can add and remove boards without powering off the Pi, means that we can try out lots of ideas without downtime. Overall, the Breakout Garden is fun, affordable and easy to use thanks to the recent software updates.