Winging It with sulfuroid's Pi-to-Feather Adapter Board

Stackable add-on boards like Arduino's shields and Raspberry Pi's HATs can dramatically accelerate prototyping by providing "plug and play" solutions to specific problems — without any wiring, soldering, or breadboarding. Adafruit's Feather standard, originally created for their own boards, but since adopted by many others in the industry, such as Particle, enables the easy addition of a single add-on board, or FeatherWing, with Doublers, Triplers, or stacking headers available for more complex projects.

But what if you want to leverage the dozens of available FeatherWings in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem? Twitter user @sulfuroid is tackling this problem head(er!)-on with a new adapter that "translates" the Feather standard's 28 pins to the 40-pin header found on modern Raspberry Pis.

Since Feathers typically ship without installed headers, they can be made breadboard-compatible using male headers, FeatherWing-compatible using female headers, or stackable by using stacking headers. This means that Feathers and FeatherWings are practically interchangeable in terms of pinouts, allowing not only FeatherWings to take advantage of the adapter, but also entire Feather boards! sulfuroid demonstrates this with the addition of an ESP32-based Feather, enabling ad hoc mesh networking on the $5 Pi Zero via Espressif's ESP-NOW protocol.

Follow @sulfuroid on Twitter for updates on this this and countless other exciting projects!