Pimoroni Breakout Garden 400 Kit for 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 the 0.96" LCD Breakout or 1.12" SPI OLED 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.

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).

We've built reverse polarity protection into our 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.

We've 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.

1.12" Mono OLED (128x128x, white/black, I2C) Breakout

A crisp, bright 1.12" OLED that's ideal for adding a small display to your project. This 128x128 pixel, monochrome white/black display is ideal for graphing, readouts, and displaying basic icons.

Features

• 1.12" white/black OLED display (128x128 pixels)
• Uses the SH1107 driver chip
• 20x20mm active area
• SPI or I2C (address 0x3C/0x3D (cut trace)) interface
• 3.3V or 5V compatible
• Reverse polarity protection
• Compatible with all models of Raspberry Pi, and Arduino
• Python library

VL53L1X Time of Flight (ToF) Sensor Breakout

These low-power-laser-based time of flight sensors have great accuracy and sampling frequency, and this particular sensor has a wide range of detection, from 4cm to 4 metres.

Use it as a proximity sensor, for presence detection, or as a laser tape measure! The speed, accuracy, and range, make this sensor ideal for collision-avoidance on robots.

It's also compatible with our fancy new Breakout Garden, where using breakouts is as easy just popping it into one of the six slots and starting to grow your project, create, and code.

Features

• VL53L1X Time of Flight (ToF) sensor (datasheet)
• 4-400cm range (27° field of view)
• Up to 50Hz ranging frequency
• +/- 25mm accuracy (+/- 20mm in the dark)
• I2C interface (address 0x29)
• 3.3V or 5V compatible
• Reverse polarity protection
• Compatible with all models of Raspberry Pi, and Arduino
• Python library

Kit Includes

1x Breakout Garden for Raspberry Pi 400

1x 1.12" Mono OLED (128x128, white/black, I2C) Breakout 

1x VL53L1X Time of Flight (ToF) Sensor Breakout