PIMORONI Breakout Garden

The Pimoroni Breakout Garden HAT is a clever way of allowing the development of sophisticated sensor and display systems without having to do lots of soldering.

 As a HAT, it is fitted with a female 2x20 pin socket so it can be attached to any Raspberry Pi with 2x20 way expansion bus (Raspberry Pi Plus versions to date). Raspberry Pi Zero boards require the headers to be added (the Raspberry Pi Zero WH is supplied with the header already soldered/

This is going to be used with a Raspberry Pi Zero WH fitted into a Pibow Zero W case. To improve stability, a Pibow Breadboard Base was added to the bottom of the stack of laser cut acrylic slices that make up the case. The supplied bolts are long enough to take the additional slice.

Assembly was reasonably straightforward, I did need to ease a couple of the corners with a curved needle file to make the Zero board fit correctly.

To use a Zero with a keyboard and display, you do need to have an On The Go cable for the micro USB (top) and a Micro to HDMI adapter (bottom). I got mine as part of the Pimoroni OctoCam package.

The key feature of the Breakout Gatden HAT is the six large sockets on the top.

These are designed to take the special format breakout board from Pimoroni.

The first breakout board is the BME680 Air Quality Sensor.

Back

The front shows the five connectors. The power and ground connections are diode protected, so if you do plug them in the wrong way round, nothing bad (or indeed nothing at all) happens.

The breakout has temperature, pressure, humidity and air quality sensors built in.

The LSM303D is a combined accelerometer and magnetometer

It can provide X, Y, Z values for acceleration and magnetic field strength (making it suitable for use as a digital compass).

The third sensor is the BMP280 temperature, pressure and altitude sensor.

The last breakout board I have is the 1.12" 128x128 pixel OLED display board.

Next, putting them all to work.