Re:The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System
by BoorishBears on Thursday July 15, 2021 @09:28AM
(#27844399)
You're actually making my point
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...
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.