Expansion kit allows more connections to Raspberry Pi

Adafruit, a New York-based company that sells electronics components for hobbyists, has released an expansion pack for the Raspberry Pi. The kit allows additional connections of the mini PC to be used.

MIT engineer Limor Fried’s company has been making electronics for hobby projects available since 2005. The latest product, the Adafruit Pi Cobbler Breakout Kit for Raspberry Pi, is a expansion pack for the Raspberry Pi from the eponymous foundation. The Raspberry Pi, a mini computer with ARM soc, USB, audio, video and LAN ports, and an SD card slot on a board of just under 86 by 54 millimeters, has a number of unused header connections.

These headers, twenty-six in total, can be used to connect peripherals and include pins for gpio, spi-bus and I²c interfaces. With the kit, those connections can easily be used to easily connect additional hardware to the Raspberry Pi. The kit consists of a ribbon cable to connect to the headers, a small pcb in which the supplied plug can be soldered and separate headers that can be attached to the pcb.

Given the low price of the Raspberry Pi, which starts at $25, the kit costs just $8. The name comes from the tinkering of prototypes: cobbling together.