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Breadboard tutorial: learn electronics with

Raspberry Pi
By Russell Barnes. Posted about 7 years ago.

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This humble plastic block full of holes can be used to create just about
anything

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Most of our projects are tested using a small piece of plastic known as a
breadboard. O!cially, it’s known as a ‘solderless breadboard’ because
it enables you to use circuit parts without soldering them together.

Electrical components are connected by pushing them into the holes in

a breadboard. These holes are connected in strips, as shown in the main
image. If you push a wire, or a di"erent component, into one hole in a
strip, and another wire into the hole next to it, it’s as if you’d physically
joined (or soldered) the two wires.

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See also:

MagPi Essentials: Simple Electronics with GPIO Zero

The best Raspberry Pi Starter Kits
Reaction Game: build a circuit game using LEDs, buttons, and a
breadboard
Getting You Started Kit with Raspberry Pi Zero W review

How to use an electronics breadboard with a

Raspberry Pi

In the old days, people would either solder wire components together
on an actual breadboard, or they’d wrap wires together around nails in a
pinboard.

For a lot of Raspberry Pi fans, using a breadboard is part of life. But for
many newcomers this quirky piece of kit is ba#ing: a smorgasbord of
holes arranged in rows and columns that seem to make little sense.

So we think it’s high time we had a beginner’s guide to how a

breadboard works. In this tutorial, we’ll explain how these holes are
arranged, and how to set up a circuit on your breadboard.

If you already know all this, feel free to move on. If not, stick around
and learn about one of the most fun things you can do: building your
own circuits and hooking hardware up to your Raspberry Pi.

Using a breadboard

Breadboard
LED light
Resistor
Male-to-female jumper leads
Male-to-male jumper leads

Create a simple LED circuit with a breadboard

Circuit diagrams can be a little hard to understand for the novice. So we

use visual breadboard diagrams, like this. This complete diagram uses
the power and ground pins from a Raspberry Pi to light up an LED.

Step 1

The breadboard's live rail

Take a female-to-male jumper lead (the colour of the wire doesn’t

matter) and connect the female end to a 5V pin on the Raspberry Pi.
Place the male end of the lead into a hole on the red rail on the
breadboard.

Step 2

The breadboard's ground rail

Take another female-to-male jumper and connect the female end to a

ground (GND) pin on the Raspberry Pi. The male end goes into a hole on
the blue (ground) rail. All blue holes now act as a ground pin.

Step 3

Add a resistor to the breadboard

Take a resistor and connect one leg of it to a hole on the ground rail of
the breadboard. It’s now linked to the ground pin of the Raspberry Pi
(via the jumper lead we used in the previous step). Take the other leg
and connect it to a hole on the main breadboard.

Step 4

Add the LED to the breadboard

Take an LED component and look at the legs. Notice that one of the legs
is shorter than the other. Place the shorter leg in a hole on the same row
as the resistor. This leg is now connected to the resistor (which is linked
to the ground rail, and therefore to the ground pin on the Raspberry Pi).

Step 5

Wire up the breadboard

Place the longer leg in a hole on the next row along. Now take another
male-to-male jumper lead and place one end in the hole next to the
long leg of the LED. Place the other end in a hole on the red live rail to
complete the circuit. The LED lights up.

Step 6

Russell Barnes

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