Breakout Garden Mini

Now with SPI! The easiest way to use breakouts with your Raspberry Pi. No soldering required. Simply plug up to three Pimoroni breakouts (2xI2C, 1xSPI) into the slots of the Breakout Garden Mini and start programming and creating.

Let your projects grow on Breakout Garden. It's ideal for prototyping projects without complicated wiring, soldering or breadboards, and you always have the option to change your setup thanks to the way Breakout Garden works.

Breakout Garden's three stable slots are edge connectors that connect Pimoroni breakouts to the pins on your Raspberry Pi. This new version of Breakout Garden has an SPI slot for Pimoroni SPI breakouts like our 0. 96" LCD breakout or 1.12" SPI OLED breakout.

It also has two I2C slots for Pimoroni I2C breakouts. Since I2C is a bus, you can use multiple I2C devices at the same time, provided they don't have the same address (we made sure all our breakouts have different addresses).

Features

• Three stable edge 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 (1x10 pin header strips included)
• Reverse polarity protection (built into the breakouts)
• Board in PHAT format
• Compatible with all Raspberry Pi models with 40-pin header

Using Breakout Garden

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

SPI is a faster, higher throughput protocol for addressing devices such as displays.
The Breakout Garden Mini's SPI slot uses Chip Select 1 (BCM 7) and BCM 19 for the GPIO pin (which is used for things like LCD backlights).

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 Mini 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

Visit the Breakout Garden GitHub repo and try out our automated installer. Just drop a few breakouts into Breakout Garden Mini, 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.