Breakout boards

The General Purpose Input Output (GPIO) pins of the Micro:bit are extremely narrowly printed on the edge connector. It is difficult to use them directly, and soldering can ruin the board. So, many organizations have developed special products that make the GPIO pins of the Micro:bit easily accessible. These products are known by various names, such as breakout boards, GPIO expanders, I/O extensions, and edge connectors. The following are the URLs of the web pages for such products:

• https://www.sparkfun.com/products/16445
• https://kitronik.co.uk/collections/microbit-and-accessories/products/5601b-edge-connector-breakout-board-for-bbc-microbit-pre-built
• https://robu.in/product/microbit-gpio-expansion-board/
• https://www.dfrobot.com/product-1867.html
• https://wiki.dfrobot.com/IO_Extender_for_microbit_V2.0_SKU_MBT0008

I urge you all to procure one of these or any other edge connector of your choice, as we will need these for the demonstrations in this book.

I, too, own a couple of them, as shown in the following photos:

Figure 1.14 – A couple of edge connectors I own

Here, we have Micro:bit V1 and V2 inserted into the edge connectors:

Figure 1.15 – Micro:bits with the edge connectors

In the following section, we will get acquainted with a software program, Fritzing, that will help us visualize circuits.