I like building projects with Raspberry Pis, which are small, low-cost computers that can control things like sensors, motors, and displays. They connect to these electrical components through a row of 40 pinouts, but the pins follow no logical order. Power, ground, and signal pins are scattered along the header, so I was constantly frustrated when stopping to check the pinout chart to figure out which pin to use.
To fix this, I designed a custom adapter hat that re-organizes the pins into labelled, logically ordered groups. It works with Raspberry Pi models 3, 4, and 5. I designed the board in KiCad and soldered the headers and pins myself. The pins are grouped in easily readable sections corresponding to their function (e.g. power, ground, GPIO, I2C, SPI, UART).
Since then, I’ve been able to build projects without worrying about wiring to the wrong pin. I’ve also shared the hat with friends, so they don’t have to worry about it either!
