Ever since the Raspberry Pi HATs (Hardware Attached to Top) were announced, there has been an unspoken ‘race’ to see who would get theirs out first. The Raspberry Pi Foundation are already working on their own one, although we don’t know what it is, and now both Adafruit and Dtronixs have thrown their hat into the ring (sorry, couldn’t resist).

HATs announced from Adafruit so far are:

• A perma-proto board for prototyping
• A GPS-enabled board
• A board with an embedded 2.2″ TFT (a bit like the PiTFT, but as a GPIO board)
• An Arcade HAT, which one would imagine is a rudimentary games controller

You can follow Adafruit’s HAT-a-Day blog by visiting this page.

Also in contention for first HAT release is Newcastle-based Dtronixs. They’ve announced the following:

• UserPort – a mimic of the BBC’s micros digital User Port and Analogue Port. Digital I/O is provided by a I2C MCP23017 16-channel Port Expander and Analogue Inputs by a 4-channel SPI MCP3004 10-bit ADC.
• Breadboard – allowing the use of a 170-ping breadboard plus embedded LEDs and switches, as well as 4 x analogue inputs.
• DIO32 – a 32-channel Digital I/O board with two MCP23017 I2C Port Expanders.
• Breakout!+ allows easy access to the I2C, SPI and UART interfaces and includes a small prototyping area for building circuits on.

My money for first release is Dtronixs – they seem like a very small, agile company with a great number of existing boards for the Model B out already. They are small but this could be their ticket to big recognition. They currently sell on Tindie.