An Adafruit proto Bonnet for the Raspberry Pi, Jetson Nano and Grove I2C

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babelboard bonnet
Adafruit's protoBoards lets you make a bread-boarded design permanent, and Seeed Studio's Grove system lets you wire up a prototype really quickly.

In this half-day project I combined the two to create a simple, cheap, flexible prototyping system for the Raspberry Pi and Jetson Nano

The Grove system is based on standard 4-way connectors which can be used to connect digital, analogue and I2C-based components. I've focused on I2C since most of the robots I build use I2C to interact with their environment.

I mentioned the Jetson Nano - a hot topic at the moment, as NVIDIA have just announced a low-cost 2 GB version of the Nano which will be available at the end of the month. One of the clever features of the Nano is that it has a Pi-compatible header, so the bonnet will work on the Nano without modification.

Fritzing the design

I started by laying out an Adafruit bonnet design using Fritzing. The design is really simple. All it does is connect the pins of the Grove connector to the relevant pins on the Pi's GPIO header.

The only minor complication is that the Grove connector has 2mm spaced pins, but past experience has taught me that a little judicious bending allow you to fit one to a 0.1" spaced proto board.

A simple test

I tested the board using a Grove ADC board connected to a Grove potentiometer.

My ADC board is based on the ADC121. I've been a fan of the Grove hardware for a decade, and my board is an old one. It has a default I2C address of 0x55 unlike more recent versions which have a configurable address that defaults to 0x50.

I wrote a short Python script to read the voltage from the potentiometer and ran it. As expected, the voltage changed as I twiddled the knob. Success!

A quick demo

Here's a short video of the output from the zero as I twiddle the knob of the potentiometer.


I can now connect the zero to all kinds of useful I2c devices - servo controllers, motor controllers and a 9-axis motion tracking module.

Coming next

I'm working on an inexpensive LIDAR which reads distance data from eight VL53L1X Time of Flight Sensors using an MCP23008 port expander to selectively enable them. More details soon!

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