Mike P.'s Raspberry Pi HAT for Makers Aims at Simplifying JTAG, SWD, UART, I2C, and SPI Connectivity

Taiwan-based maker Mike P. has released a compact HAT add-on for the Raspberry Pi family of single-board computers which, he claims, is "the cheapest option to get into JTAG, SWDIO" and other features without having to resort to loose jumper wires.

"I was sick and tired of using expensive brands to flash my projects under Windows and every single time I had to figure out what was wrong," Mike writes of the project's origins. "What update was going to crash which part? Will it be the driver? Maybe one of the softwares in the chain?"

"So I decided to try and use OpenOCD under Linux," Mike continues, "as the Raspberry Pi is a great candidate to be used as an interface for it. Once I got all working (on a RPI0W [Raspberry Pi Zero W]) I never looked back and it is very straightforward to get all working."

"Surely you can just use jumper wires and do the same thing, but I like to have a breakout that eliminates the risk of miscounting the pins and so on. I have broken out what I consider to be more than enough for a maker and that is: SPI0, SPI1 with the possibility of using WP, JTAG, SWD, UART, and I2C, and I have added an RGB LED that can be controlled from Bash or what ever you feel more happy to use as it is connected to 3 GPIOs."

Mike has begun selling the fully-assembled boards, which are sized for a Raspberry Pi Zero but compatible with any Raspberry Pi board with a 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header — or, indeed, any single-board computer sharing the same pinout — for $10 via Tindie.

Schematics and documentation for the project can be found on GitHub under an unspecified license.