Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
There are plenty of online component suppliers where you can buy all of these parts,
such as www.skpang.co.uk , www.sparkfun.co.uk , www.coolcomponents.com and www.
protopic.com, as well as most high street electronic stores like Maplin Electronics ( www.
maplin.co.uk) . Some stores sell bags of components with a collection of LEDs and resis-
tors, as well as bags of jumper leads. If you are finding it hard to find jumper leads of the
pin-to-pin type, you can buy a length of solid-core wire and some wire strippers to make
your own jumper leads quite simply. This adventure assumes you have bought jumper
leads, but the instructions are the same for solid-core wire.
For the Raspberry Pi:
You can use jumper leads of the socket-to-pin type to connect directly from the pins on
the Raspberry Pi to the holes on the breadboard. This can sometimes be quite fiddly,
however, and it's a bit tricky to count through all the pins. In this adventure I use a pre-
soldered Adafruit Pi-T-Cobbler, which is a ribbon cable that runs from the Raspberry
Pi and plugs directly into the breadboard, complete with labelled pins. If you know
how to solder, you can pick up a Pi T-Cobbler kit and solder it together yourself, which
is much cheaper. FigureĀ 5-2 shows you all the parts needed to do this adventure using
the Raspberry Pi.
You can buy the Adafruit Pi-T-Cobbler direct from www.adafruit.com or from www.
skpang.co.uk. Make sure you buy the pre-assembled Pi-T-Cobbler (unless you want to
have a go at soldering as well!).
Just as this topic was being written, the Raspberry Pi model B+ was released.
All of the adventures in this topic will work with the Raspberry Pi B+, however
you should buy an additional lead with your Pi-T-Cobbler, so that you can correctly
connect it to your Raspberry Pi B+ 40-way connector. The lead you need has
a 40-pin socket at one end that plugs into the Raspberry Pi B+, and a 26-way
connector at the other end that plugs into your Pi-T-Cobbler. You can get one of
these from www.skpang.co.uk at the same time that you buy the Pi-T-Cobbler.
For the PC and Mac:
Because the PC and Mac don't have their own hardware pins like the Raspberry
Pi, I have put together a small hardware platform that you can use on these com-
puters which is based around an Arduino. You can use any Arduino for this pur-
pose, providing that you pre-load my special open source software that makes it
function just like the Raspberry Pi input/output pins, and you can read about
the Arduino here: http://arduino.cc. In this adventure you will use an Arduino
called the Arduino Pro Micro. You will also need a USB lead to connect this to
your computer.
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