Capes - BeagleBone - page 563

9.0 Introduction
Previous chapters of this topic show a variety of ways to interface BeagleBone Black to the
physical world by using a breadboard and wiring to the P8 and P9 headers. This is a great
approach because it's easy to modify your circuit to debug it or try new things. At some
point, though, you might want a more permanent solution, either because you need to move
the Bone and you don't want wires coming loose, or because you want to share your hard-
ware with the masses.
You can easily expand the functionality of the Bone by adding a cape . A cape is simply a
board — often a printed circuit board (PCB) — that connects to the P8 and P9 headers and
follows a few standard pin usages. You can stack up to four capes onto the Bone. Capes can
range in size from Bone-sized ( Recipe 9.2 ) to much larger than the Bone ( Recipe 9.1 ).
This chapter shows how to attach a couple of capes, move your design to a protoboard,
then to a PCB, and finally on to mass production.