Here at Tindie, we love a product born out of need. Sometimes that’s a need for something shiny and innovative, but sometimes the need to not endlessly repeat steps in projects is great motivation. This Proto Power Hat for Raspberry Pi falls into the latter camp as the designer, BareNakedEmbedded, found that for every Pi Hardware project undertaken they began by adding fan enable buttons, a fan and a power button.
This prototyping hat is compatible with raspberry pi 2, 3, 3B+ and 4, so there’s a high chance it’s compatible with the Pis you already own. It has a 30mm by 30mm fan on board which is set, by default, to power on with the Raspberry Pi. Optionally it has a power button for the Pi and hat or connections for an external power button and an onboard power LED indicator. There is a 25mm by 35mm through-hole prototyping area and the hat has lots of power pads broken out including nine 5V pads, nine 3.3V pads and twenty-one ground pads. The standard collection of Raspberry Pi GPIO pins is broken out to the header pins, maintaining the Pi layout, so this hat could be used with other standard Raspberry Pi add-on modules.
Mechanically the hat matches the profile of the Raspberry Pi chassis and can be mounted to the Pi using some M3 bolts or standoffs. As such it makes a nice rugged start to a prototype project. The hat is open source and the complete KiCAD files are supplied along with the production Gerbers in the project links. as well as a link to some documentation around the fan enable circuit.
