Raspberry Pi Prototyping Boards Available At Adafruit

If you’re one of the lucky few with a Raspberry Pi, adafruit has two things you might be interested in if you’re into GPIO hacking.

First up is the Pi Cobbler kit. It’s a 2×13 ribbon cable with a breakout PCB ready to attach to a solderless breadboard; perfect for playing around with (or cobbling together… get it?) the GPIO pins on your Raspi.

Next up is the Pi Plate kit that comes complete with enough perfboard space, screw terminals, and female headers to kill a yak. All the GPIO, I2C, and SPI pins are broken out on the Pi Plate, making it very easy to prototype a semi-permanent Raspi circuit.

They might be just prototyping boards now, but we expect these Pi Plates to quickly evolve into a truly useful device with the addition of a few level shifters, port expanders and a few ADCs and DAC thrown in for good measure. If you’re still on the fence and thinking about buying a Raspi, I ordered one last week from element14 and now have an expected ship date of November 5th. These things must be really popular.

24 thoughts on “Raspberry Pi Prototyping Boards Available At Adafruit

    1. make that at least 85,000 units so far last time I looked. The ones that ended up on ebay are either opportunists trying to sell a $25 device for $125 or people that didn’t realise they weren’t buying a complete htpc device (Didn’t read the fine manual before they purchased).

      1. I was just trying to be funny. It is so hard to find the things it does seem like they way under built the thing. Too bad since I have to wonder how many have ended up in Schools vs hobbyists.

  1. Really popular, true. However, Allied is just horribly slow compared to RS. I ordered from both around the same and have has the RS delivery for about a week and was told next month from Allied.

  2. oh haku, whats the problem? you havent gotten your Pi yet and so you want to whine about peoples Pi projects and the fact that HAD is posting them here? it is a hack. what does it matter what its on? they are spending the time to do the research to find this stuff cut them some slack. plus its hack-A-day. anything more than a single hack a day should be considered a bonus.

  3. I ordered mine from Newark March 22,first it was supposed to ship June 28,looked like it was going to but then got pushed to July 5,now July 12. Hopefully the 12 is the day,can’t wait to get my hands on it.

  4. For all those still waiting, all I can say is you’ve been a victim of the success of the raspberry pi. There were something in the order of 100,000-200,000 people subscribed to their mailing list, this was for an initial run of 10,000 units. They made an agreement with Farnell/RS to take over production of the boards, the initial run was delayed due to circumstances beyond their control and also for FCC/EU certification. Production has been ramping up and they’ve gotten at least 85,000 out to people so far, they’re processing orders as quickly as they can.

    1. Do we know if the current ship dates are an over-exaggeration of what will probably happen (i.e. they’re ramping up production so I may get my Pi sooner), or are the current ship dates already reflecting the increased production?

      I mean, six months? Really?

  5. IDE / PATA CABLE CUT IN TWO…
    combined with a little cut up solid core wire and tape, gives you TWO breakout “boards”

    i just ruined your sale. haha this is HACK-A-DAY and us loyal hardwareHACKERS will ruin any sale we see fit(to ruin)

    IDE cables are a dime a dozen.

      1. oh. i didnt know, the pins/pitch are too small?
        i guess ill admit defeat on that one.

        what about using a drive adaptor? … the kind that lets u use a laptop hdd in a desktop…

        i guess you’d have to make sure it does not connect all the ground wires together? (or hack it)

        the smaller laptop hdd cables can still be had, im not sure if i have one though. theyr harder to find. why they didnt use standard connector i will never understand, even if someone told me.

        after all, its an SBC aimed at hobbyists, right?

      2. @Thereeck
        no, floppy drive cables have the same pitch as IDE.
        you can even cut(saw) off part of an IDE cable and use it as floppy cable, pin1 is up to you.

        floppy has less WIRES(pins/positions/holes)

  6. Would love a eagle PCB template to build some “shields”.

    My idea is a MCU of some kind to handle the low-level stuff, interfaced to the raspberry by SPI or UART, ofcause with a bootloader for the same interface, so RPI can reflash it.

    The board should have some 3-pin molex for 1-wire temperature sensors, a few ADC/digital screw terminals, and maybe a Xbee header.

    Not too hard to make once the template for pins etc is there.

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