Breakout Garden for Raspberry Pi 400 Pimoroni

Now at right angles for the Raspberry Pi 400! An easy, solderless, swappable way to use breakouts with your Raspberry Pi 400 – just pop up to three Pimoroni breakouts (2 x I2C, 1 x SPI) into the slots and get coding and creating!

Breakout Garden plugs into your shiny new Pi 400’s GPIO pins and lets you connect up to three of our extensive selection of Pimoroni breakouts so they’re conveniently facing towards you and the right way up. We’ve got environmental sensors so you can keep track of the temperature and humidity in your office, a whole host of little screens for important notifications, readouts and GIFs, and, of course, LEDs (the Pi 400 is great, but needs more LEDs, amirite?). We’ve got a ton more too – check out the complete list of breakouts here!

The three sturdy black slots are edge connectors that connect the breakouts to the pins on your Raspberry Pi. There’s one slot for SPI breakouts (like our 0.96″ LCD Breakout), and two for I2C breakouts. Because I2C is a bus, you can use multiple I2C devices at the same time, providing they don’t have the same I2C address (we’ve made sure that all of our breakouts have different addresses, and we print them on the back of the breakouts so they’re easy to find).

As well as being a handy way to add functionality to your Pi 400, Breakout Garden is also very useful for prototyping projects without the need for complicated wiring, soldering, or breadboards, and you can grow or change up your setup at any time.

Please note that breakouts are sold separately!

Features

• Three sturdy edge-connector 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 angle format for the Pi 400

Using Breakout Garden

Because of the way that I2C (the protocol that Breakout Garden uses) works, it doesn’t matter which slot on the Breakout Garden that you plug your breakout into. Each I2C device has an address (you’ll see it on the back of each breakout) that it uses to identify itself to other I2C devices, so it’s effectively saying to your Raspberry Pi, “Hey, it’s me, Bob!”

SPI is a faster, higher-throughput protocol for talking to devices like displays. The SPI slot on Breakout Garden Mini uses chip select 1 (BCM 7) and BCM 19 for the GPIO pin (used for things like LCD backlights).

Pimoroni built reverse polarity protection into their Pimoroni breakouts, meaning that there’s no magic blue smoke if you accidentally plug one in the wrong way round. However, the correct way to plug them in is to make sure that the labels on the pins on your breakout and the labels on each Breakout Garden 400 slot match up.

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

Software

As a first port of call, we’d recommend checking out the shop pages for whatever breakouts you’re using – they will link you to the Python library and installation instructions.

Alternatively, head over to the Breakout Garden GitHub repo and give our automagic installer a go. Just pop a few breakouts into Breakout Garden 400, run the installer, and SHAZAM!, the software for the appropriate breakouts will be installed. We’ve also got a few nice examples to show you what’s possible.