What do I lose buying a generic breakout board for half the price of a branded shield/hat/wing and hooking it up on a $2 piece of protoboard or with some jumpers?
The reductio ad adsurbum on this would compare these boards to PCI cards for your PC - you wouldn't expect the majority of PC users to have to hand assemble their GPU would you?
https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-adafruit-stemma-qt/sp...
Like it's literally the shield minus a set form factor.
It takes 0 more knowledge.
It's still plugging boards together, still runs the same code.
Just not in a shape that will cover up every single pin you have. Which is something that makes things harder for beginners if anything.
If with a Feather/Wing combo you don't need to worry about 5v/3v, if there wasn't an enforced shape that would not change in the slightest.
> All Feathers and Featherwings use 3.3V logic - so do not make anything that requires 5.0V logic. You must accept and emit 3.3V logic on any Feather/Wing (except for Analog inputs)
Like, the literal shape of the PCB has nothing to do with their compatibility, rules like do.
Same with SPI pins, RX/TX, etc:
> Bus Pins
> To make it easy to create add-ons, we have fixed inter-chip bus pins:
-
The main change vs female headers is now you're forcing beginners to choose something that locks up their hardware.
This isn't a new thing, beginners since Arduino days have been overwhelmed by how shields take over all their pins and often run into clashes.
It's less of a burden if anything to have proper connectors or simply well marked female headers, which newbies can then easily follow between boards.
I mean if even if you're experienced with electronics just try following which pins a board is actually using. You'll need to look up a PCB schematic.
That's infinitely less beginner friendly than simple color coding and fixed connectors.
Also, vendors want to make their microcontroller boards compatible with their breakout boards, which means supporting MxN combinations without having to do testing and write documentation for all of them.
Right now I can get the M0 mentioned in the article in any size from "a little bigger than my thumb" to the size of my hand.
The breakouts are almost universally smaller than those common denominator shields since they don't have to cover up every pin on the board.
But I don't follow your second sentence. You still need the same amount of testing and documentation with the above approach.
All you've changed is the connection style from "jumpers into headers" to "pins into headers".
The most you save is "plug wire X into pin Y", but in exchange you had to add 15 odd extra pins to the breakout to satisfy the packaging requirements.
Not exactly saving effort there...
Yeah, me too! That's why I created Feather. Feather is a flexible and powerful family of microcontroller main-boards (Feathers) and daughter-boards (Wings) with a wide range of capabilities."