We’ve designed this breakout board so that you can solder on the piece of right angle female header and pop it straight onto the bottom left 5 pins on your Raspberry Pi’s GPIO header (pins 1, 3, 5, 7, 9). The right angle header also has the advantage of positioning the breakout away from the Pi’s CPU so as to minimise radiated heat.
Software
Bosch provide a C library,for this sensor, but we’ve also updated our BME680?Python library?(with a quick and painless one-line-installer) to work with the BME688, making it straightforward to combine it with our other boards (why not use a Blinkt! or Unicorn pHAT to visualise air quality in real time?)
In our testing, we’ve found that the sensor requires some burn-in time (at least 20 minutes) and that readings may take a couple of minutes to stabilise after beginning measurements
The trace on the back of the board marked ADDR can be cut to change the I2C address from the default of 0x76 to 0x77, meaning that you can use up to two sensors on the same Raspberry Pi or Arduino
The BME280, BME680, BMP280 and BME688 breakouts all share the same I2C addresses, so if you’re using two together then you’ll need to change the I2C address on one of them using the solder bridge or cuttable traces.
Dimensions: approx 19mm x 19mm x 5mm (L x W x H, including connector)
The super-smart BME688 air quality sensor can measure temperature, pressure and humidity precisely. It also has an upgraded, AI-enhanced gas scanner!
Like its predecessor the BME680, this high quality sensor can be used to monitor every aspect of your environment, taking high precision measurements of?temperature, pressure and humidity.
Additionally, the BME688 has an?updated gas scanner?function?with extended measurements, which will react to changes in volatile organic compounds (VOCs), volatile sulfur compounds (VSCs) and the presence of carbon monoxide and hydrogen to give a general measure of indoor or outdoor air quality. With?Bosch’s software, you can analyse the gas readings further and train the algorithms to make inferences about specific air quality indicators, including the likelihood of bacteria growth and the presence of other organic contaminants.
Want to get an idea of whether there’s adequate ventilation in your bedroom, your workshop, or workplace? Set up a BME688 on a Pi Zero W and have it log sensor readings to a file or post them into your home automation software or a web service like?adafruit.io?or?freeboard.io.
This breakout is compatible with our fancy?Breakout Garden?system, where using breakouts is as easy just popping it into one of the slots and starting to grow your project, create, and code.?It’s?also?Qw/ST compatible?so?it can be plugged into a whole range of different?microcontrollers and HATs?with Qwiic or STEMMA QT connectors.
Our?Blinkt! Python library?will have you blasting out rainbows in two shakes of a unicorn’s tail! There’s a stack of examples too, from binary clocks to cheerlights and flickering candles to Larson scanners!
Notes
Be careful to plug in your Blinkt! the correct way round, it has curves on the top that match the corners of your Raspberry Pi
If you want to access the rest of the GPIO at the same time as using Blinkt! then our?Mini Black HAT Hack3r?is the ideal accompaniment, allowing you to combine Blinkt! with another HAT or pHAT, or just prototype using the GPIO pins for your own project
The dimensions of Blinkt! are 65mm long x 8mm wide x 8.5mm thick (thickness includes header and pixels)
Additional accessories shown in photos not included
We featured Blinkt! on a special episode of Bilge Tank where we tried to come up with as many different code examples as possible in one morning.
We’re?big fans of electronic paper?at Pirate HQ – it makes for a lovely, crisp, high contrast display that’s readable even in bright sunlight and it doesn’t squirt unnecessary blue light into your environs like LCDs do. It’s also ultra low power (EPD displays only consume power while they’re refreshing), and the images on the display stick around for a really long time whilst the display is unpowered.
Using a RP2040 chip means we can drive the hardware in fun, experimental, low level ways. We’ve written custom drivers for the EPD display that prioritise low power consumption whilst enabling lightning fast refresh rates.
Features
2.9″ black and white E Ink? display (296 x 128 pixels)
Ultra wide viewing angles
Ultra low power consumption
Dot pitch – 0.227 x 0.226 mm
Powered by RP2040 (Dual Arm Cortex M0+ running at up to 133Mhz with 264kB of SRAM)
2MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
Five front user buttons
Reset and boot buttons (the boot button can also be used as a user button)
White LED
USB-C connector for power and programming
JST-PH connector for attaching a battery (input range 2.7V – 6V)
High-precision voltage reference for battery level monitoring
You can also use?CircuitPython?on your Interstate 75! Because CircuitPython drivers are designed to work on a bunch of different microcontrollers you won’t get the fancy RP2040-architecture specific tweaks that you’ll find in our library, but you will get access to Adafruit’s mighty DisplayIO library which makes it super easy to display all sorts of different kinds of text, draw shapes and display images.
You can find a list of which breakouts are currently compatible with our C++/MicroPython build in the most recent?release notes.
We’ve also broken out a bunch of useful I2C pins, analog pins and debug pins along the side of the board so you can solder things like breakouts or analog potentiometers directly to them.
About RP2040
Raspberry Pi’s RP2040 microcontroller is a dual core ARM Cortex M0+ running at up to 133Mhz. It bundles in 264kB of SRAM, 30 multifunction GPIO pins (including a four channel 12-bit ADC), a heap of standard peripherals (I2C, SPI, UART, PWM, clocks, etc), and USB support.
One very exciting feature of RP2040 is the programmable IOs which allow you to execute custom programs that can manipulate GPIO pins and transfer data between peripherals – they can offload tasks that require high data transfer rates or precise timing that traditionally would have required a lot of heavy lifting from the CPU.
RV3028 REAL TIME CLOCK (RTC) BREAKOUT
1 × ₦9,500
