Raspberry Pi A, Руководство пользователя, Страница: 268 / 314

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H A R D W A R E H A C K I N G
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Figure 16-2:
Connecting the
Slice of Pi to a
breadboard
The Slice of Pi also offers a small amount of protection for the Pi. The use of female headers
means it’s harder to accidentally short-circuit two pins, and the spacing of the headers—with
the eight general-purpose pins brought to one header and the other specialised pins brought to
another—makes wiring mistakes less likely. More importantly, the Slice of Pi doesn’t provide
direct access to any of the pins labelled as Do Not Connect (see Chapter 13, “Learning to Hack
Hardware”), so there’s less risk of damaging the Pi with a wrong connection.
The connections for an XBee wireless interface could also prove useful if you are considering
using the Pi in an embedded computing project. When combined with a compatible trans-
ceiver—such as an XBee, RF-BEE or RN-XV module—it allows for wireless access to the Pi’s
UART serial port. Such access could be used to read sensor details from the Pi, take control of
the Pi’s software or even control a Pi-powered robot from a remote location.
Finally, the prototyping area provides an alternative to breadboards or stripboards for
smaller circuit designs. If you are considering developing a small add-on module for the
Raspberry Pi, such as a sensor board for reading temperatures or detecting moisture, the
required components can be soldered directly to the Slice of Pi. Thanks to the low cost of the
board, this provides an easy way to create bespoke add-on modules for the Pi that are entirely
self-contained, with no wiring required—just connect the Slice of Pi to the Raspberry Pi’s
GPIO port and the device is ready to go (see Figure 16-3).