There are a multitude of options for connecting devices to the Raspberry Pi. We will touch on a few of these in the following sections. You can purchase these devices if you wish and expand the options that are available for you on the Raspberry Pi.
Regardless of whether you purchase a shield or not, you will need the components listed under the Connecting directly to the GPIO pins section if you wish to run the programs in this chapter.
First, we will look at prototyping shields.
A number of prototyping shields are available on the market for the Raspberry Pi. A prototyping shield is an electronic component that sits on top of the Raspberry Pi and is connected to the GPIO pins.
Part of the device acts as a breadboard, which allows you to connect a variety of electronic components to it and control them via applications running on Raspbian.
Some examples of prototyping plates include:
Pi Cobbler
Adafruit Prototyping Pi Plate Kit
RKPT Lucia
Humble Pi
The...