Raspberry comes with standard for add-ons for Raspberry Pi B+

Raspberry has introduced a new standard with HAT that should make it easier to use add-on hardware for the RaspBerry Pi B+. This should make ‘plug and play’ possible.

According to Raspberry, many hardware add-ons have been developed for its mini computers in recent times. That prompted the company to develop a standard for this to make it easier for makers to get their add-on compatible with the Raspberry Pi. HAT, which stands for Hardware Attached On Top and consists of a collection of ‘rules’, is only available for the model B+, which Raspberry released recently.

The Raspberry Pi models have a so-called gpio connector that makes it possible to connect external hardware to the boards. The Raspberry Pi normally does not know what exactly is being connected, so users have to take the necessary actions to get the hardware working. However, the use of the HAT standard should allow plug and play: with HAT, the Raspberry Pi automatically ensures that the correct drivers are loaded, because the board recognizes what is being connected.

Raspberry recently introduced its Model B+, a successor to the previously released B version. One of the biggest changes was the gpio, which now has 40 pins instead of 26. In addition, the number of USB 2.0 ports has been doubled from two to four and the power consumption has been reduced from 1.0W to 0.5W.