I recently purchased the smart-elex Raspberry pi GPIO starter kit. I placed the order on Saturday 10t August and it was delivered on the following Tuesday. So following the speedy delivery what did I receive?
Kit Includes
1x Smart Elex Pi-Cobbler equivalent GPIO Breakout kit (No soldering is required pre-assembled for you. Simply plug & play)
1x Ribbon Cable including connectors 200mm.Connectors include strain relief.
1x GPIO Breakout board.
65x Male-Male jumpers cables for breadboard circuitry
1x 400 tie-point transparent solderless breadboard.
6x LEDs (2 of each: Red, Yellow, Green)
2x 6mmx6mm Miniature Tactile switches
9x Quality Metal Foil Resistors (3x330R,3x1k,3x10K)
1x Tilt Switch
All this for less than £10 delivered!
All components are of a very high quality and the GPIO Breakout board that connects into the breadboard is pre-assembled to a high standard. (All pins soldered and still clearly labelled).
You can connect the ribbon cable to the Raspberry PI GPIO socket then the other end connects to the GPIO breakout socket on the breadboard. this allows for testing and electronics projects to be assembled without any soldering.
To test its functionality I created a simple LED circuit and connected to the Raspberry PI.
Very Simple starter project to demonstrate the use of the board – Turn off the power to the Raspberry PI (Please be careful with ANY electronics project as you may cause damage to your PI!)
Connect up the LED and resistor as per the simple diagram. The +3.3V goes to the top left pin. connect the 0V to ground. When the Raspberry PI is powered on it should light the LED.Lets make it a little more interesting… Power off the PI again and move the +3.3V wire to one of the GPIO pins.
The easy way to control the GPIO from the command prompt is to use wiringPI – download and install from the following location:
https://projects.drogon.net/raspberry-pi/wiringpi/download-and-install/
When you power back on you can set the gpio mode and state using the following commands (Change the 0 to the GPIO number you selected.) this should select the GPIO pin to be used as an output then turn the LED on then OFF again….
For more detail: Smart Elex Raspberry PI components review.