Ding dong! Hear that? It's the PiCowbell ringing, letting you know that the new Adafruit PiCowbell Proto is finally in stock and ready to assist your Raspberry Pi Pico and Pico W project with handy hardware and practical prototyping.
The PiCowbell Proto is the same size and shape as a Pico and is intended to socket underneath to make programming and sensor connectivity easy. Reset button? Yes! STEMMA QT / Qwiic connector for fast I2C? Indeed.
Please Note! To keep things flexible, this PiCowbell does not come with headers: there are a lot of possible configurations and we stock various headers depending on how you want to solder and attach. Especially if you want the Pico on top so that the BOOTSEL button and LED are accessible.
Use Pico Stacking Headers if you want to be able to plug into a breadboard or other accessory with sockets
Use Pico Socket Headers if you want to plug directly in and have a nice solid connection that doesn't have any poking-out bits
Use Short Socket Headers for a very slim but pluggable design, note that you'll want to trim down the Pico's headers or use the short plug headers on the Pico to have a skinny sandwich
Solder the PCB directly to the Pico headers - of course, this is very compact and inexpensive but you won't be able to remove the PiCowbell
The PiCowbell Proto provides you with:
Right angle reset button that sticks out the end
Right angle JST SH connector for I2C / Stemma QT / Qwiic connection. Or can use it for plain GPIO wiring if you don't have any I2C devices to attach.
Provides 3V, GND, IO4 (SDA), and IO5 (SCL)
Extra set of 4 breakout holes next to the JST SH in case you want more I2C connection or want to re-assign the I2C port.
13 rows of 4-hole connected strips in the center area. You can cut the traces between the holes but they're intended to be treated like a mini-mini breadboard
Every pad on the Pico has a duplicate hole pad next to it for solder-jumpering
The ground pads have white silkscreen rectangles to easily identify, plus one long ground strip near the reset button
One long strip of connected holes for 3.3V power
Gold-plated pads for easy soldering
Note that we do not have I2C pullups on the board, but your Qwiic/QT breakout board or accessory likely has them already on-board. If using the Philhower Arduino core, the Wire peripheral is already setup to use IO4 and IO5. If using CircuitPython or MicroPython you'll need to let the code know to look at 4+5 for SDA+SCL pins.
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