Pi GPIO with bonnet

[zachferguson]

I have a pi zero and an Adafruit lora bonnet. I noticed right away that the bonnet monopolizes all the pi GPIO pins. I did note that there is a single row of unpopulated through holes labeled like they're GPIO, but they don't match up to the pi header. Is it possible to use the pi's GPIO and the bonnet simultaneously? Are there any pictures showing this, a guide, anything? If I solder pins into the bonnet's unpopulated row, do I need to do anything else? Thanks for any info you can give me - this will be useless for my project without the GPIO access.

[mikeysklar]

The single row of GPIO pins have traces run to them so you can utilize those. This type of bonnet can also accept 2x20 stacking headers.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/1979

I'm sure you have seen this, but this is the main pinout page for the LoRA bonnets.

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-rad ... ts/pinouts

[gynot]

Just remember that you have to be careful about how you stack things. The default hat architecture allows only one hat stacked on the pins. As I understand it the "real" hat has an EEPROM more than one and that EEPROM selection conflits. To understand this better there's a github page.

https://github.com/raspberrypi/hats

Now, what's the difference between a bonnet and a hat? I don't know, could be that the bonnet only has the bus and doesn't implement the address in EEPROM which could simplify the stacking of bonnets. Someone more knowledgeable than I should answer that question.

[mikeysklar]

@gynot,

In this case @zachferguson is only asking for access to some of the unused GPIOs while using the bonnet. This was not an attempt to stack hats/bonnets.

The only bonnet definition I've come by is that they are specifically for 40-pin newer style Pi's including the Pi Zero. Not for the older 26-pin.