The developers of Raspberry Pi introduced a new specification of expansion cards for the Raspberry Pi B +

Not so long ago was presented a new “raspberry” - a miniature PC, with advanced, as compared with the Raspberry Pi A and B, capabilities. Now the developers have presented and specialized expansion cards for the Raspberry Pi B +, which are called HATs (Hardware Attached on Top).

In general, expansion cards were released earlier by third-party developers, but all this did not always work well, and not always correctly, therefore the creators of Malinka decided to standardize expansion cards. In this case, you can still use your own methods of connecting the boards to the Raspberry Pi, the developers do not insist on using their own methods.
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Separately, it is worth noting that the old Raspberry Pi old cards will work, since the first 26 pins of the GPIO model B + are similar to the previous pinout. Well, additional pins provide additional features.



The base of the HAT is a rectangular board with smooth corners and four holes for mounting the board. The holes, of course, coincide with the similar holes in B +, plus the board has its own 40W GPIO connector.

To automatically connect the board without dancing with a tambourine, 2 dedicated pins (ID_SD and ID_SC) reserved for the I2C EEPROM are used. The latter stores information about the manufacturer of the board, the configuration of the GPIO, and the ' device tree ' - information on the hardware, which allows Linux to automatically download the necessary drivers.

All necessary specifications for HAT are uploaded to GitHub .

The developers have already created a perfectly working HAT prototype with a universal connector.



Ready-made sets of connectors will be sold to Toby Electronics and other retailers:

HLE-120-02-F-DV-BE = £ 0.57 each (surface mount connector without any locating peg)
HLE-120-02-F-DV-BE-A = £ 0.67 each (surface mount connector with locating peg)
SSQ-120-02-FD = £ 0.56 each (extension header short pins)
SSQ-120-03-FD = £ 0.64 each (extension header long pins)

Via raspberrypi