Covered in This Tutorial

• Background – How the Pi Wedge came to be

• Assembly – How to connect the FTDI, ribbon cable, and breadboard

• Pin Mapping – What the silkscreen on the Wedge represents

• Logic Levels and Power – Electrical information about connecting to

the Pi

• Some additional resources

But before you begin, check out these links and brush up on topics you may

not be familiar with:

Suggested Reading

• How To Use a Breadboard

• Setting Up a Boot Card

• Serial Communication

Suggested Viewing

• Getting Started With The Raspberry Pi

◦ Part 1

◦ Part 2

◦ Part 3

Background

In the process of developing projects like the Twitter Monitor and Great

American Tweet Race around the Raspberry Pi, we found that we were

experiencing some growing pains when trying to expand the Pi into a

prototype that involved external hardware.

There’s a Pi somewhere in this ratsnest

The Raspberry Pi Model B+ has a 40-pin connector that provides access to

several communication interfaces, plus GPIO and power. But the connector

doesn’t have detailed labeling, and the native pin arrangement is somewhat

scattershot. Pins used for similar functions aren’t always grouped together,

and power and ground pins are interspersed with no obvious pattern.

The pins also don’t translate to a solderless breadboard very easily. Our

first projects used a bunch of F-M jumper wires that we just plugged into the

header. They involved a lot of “ratsnest jiggling” when things stopped

working.

Bootstrapping

In addition to the physical issues of using the I/O connector, getting started

with a brand new Raspberry Pi B+ always seems to involve a chicken-and-

egg situation. We just want to SSH into it, so we can use the command line.

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