OK, after a bunch of thinking and experimenting and finding another bug (what fun
), I have something that mostly works. The trick is to change the part to a breadboard. With that done, the forward and back work in relation to the breadboard (but probably not other parts!) One issue is though I set the pins as male (and thus they should auto connect to the female breadboard pins) they don’t connect, so we need to cheat and use wires.
you may also notice the GPIO connector looks a little odd, I offset it 0.0 5in in X and Y so it aligns to the 0.1 grid the same as the breadboard pins. That means with the default 0.1 grid the RPI boards will mate with the GPIO connector (as we will see later) without having to adjust the grid size. I think not having to change the grid size is worth the small visual change. So, move the tcobbler up 3 positions in Y then connect wires from the tcobbler (you must start at the tcobbler!) to the breadboard position where the tcobbler started like this:
Now move the tcobbler down 3 positions in Y and wire the other side the same way:
Now move the tcobbler back to its original position and the wires will disappear (but remain connected) vertically on the pins of the tcobbler. Note the pins of the breadboard on the tcobbler pins are green indicating they are connected.
At this point, if you save this sketch to a .fzz file, that will serve as the base for using the tcobbler without having to connect the wires every time. Now drag in an RPI 3 part and we see it aligns with the tcobbler GPIO pins in X and Y.
So now move the RPI3 so the gpios connect and we can add some components to demonstrate how this works
Here I have dragged in a pot from core parts with the intention of connecting the two ends to 5V and ground and the wiper to a random I/O pin on the tcobbler. To do that I selected the tcobbler, right clicked and clicked send to back. As the tcobbler is now also a breadboard it goes to the back as desired. Hovering over one of the green pins on the breadboard will bring up the pin label for that connector (best we can do unfortunately!)
Now right click on the tcobbler and select bring to the front
Now switch to schematic
where we find rats nest lines for the connections from the pot to the RPI as they should be. Switching to pcb shows the same there
and (hopefully anyway) job done. Here is the new part:
Adafruit T-Cobbler Plus-bb.fzpz (14.9 KB)
Peter