I'm currently working on an astrophotography project. This involves a Raspberry Pi with a Pi camera and WiFi and a few sensors mounted to a telescope. The sensors are to keep track of where I'm looking in the sky and display on stellarium. I wanted to be able to go full analogue and use my eyes and still keep track of what I'm looking at. This meant having the sensors separate to the Pi. I also need to be able to pack it all away to take it out of the city. I needed a connector for my sensors. Since I intend to add motorised tracking to the telescope I needed to be able to have access to the remaining header pins. The Adafruit Pi T-Cobbler plus, intended for breadboard has mounting holes and holes ideal for using as a cable restraint.

Step 1: Parts List

All you really need for this is:

Adafuit T-Cobbler plus,

A raspberry Pi,

some wire, heatshrink and a cable tie,

and of course some sensors!

Step 2: Soldering Up the Cobbler

The pins provided with the Cobbler can be saved for another project, you don't want to solder these on.

The connector and any wires is all you need to solder. I'm using multi core wire, taking care when stripping back the outer insulation, cutting the wires to length and adding the heatshrink to make a nice neat job of it.

Use the cable tie in the two holes close together to secure the cable to the breakout.

Step 3: Mounting It to a 3d Printed Part

I've uploaded all the parts I'm using for this project on Thingyverse here.

Two screws either side by the connector and It's ready to be connected with the ribbon cable to the Pi.

I'm also using the Pi Camera, so connected this when I was connecting the ribbon cable to the Pi.

The laser cut case I'm using is also on Thigyverse here and the telescope Pi camera adapter can be found here.

Step 4: Testing

My telescope project is still under development. The github is here, If your interested in contributing, get in touch!

I'm using sensors from the I2cDev library. I've ported this to the Pi, but I've removed the sensors I'm not using, dig around in the history if there's any that you want, they are all there, although I've not tested them all, so beware!

Follow the install instructions. Once the project is compiled, there are two programs I'm currently using to test the sensors, one is HMC5883L_heading for readng the HMC5883L compass heading and the other is MPU6050, which will return the pitch and roll from the MPU6050s triple axis accelerometer. The output is not accurate as I'm not applying any calibration or offsets to the result and the output is noisy because there is no filtering, but All I need to see is the data changing as I expect to see the breakout is working!