The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System
learn.adafruit.com
learn.adafruit.com
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."
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...
I would have expected 1 wing to have many feathers, not the other way around.
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3900 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4300
it's a feather mainboard, but with the 'wing' nomenclature.
Ah, of course. Inches.
Stuff this scale should be drawn in millimetres, imho. Keep inches for tables and chairs.
You can see in the first schematic that it's 0.9" by 2.0", which gives you 9x20 hole positions.
I'm always delighted to see new open hardware projects, they always feel rare to me, and I'm stoked there are things like the feather making it marginally easier.
https://github.com/AdamMarciniak/CygnusX1
The schematics on the adafruit site helped me design my board and wire it all up properly!
I understand if you are a casual trying to do embedded for the first time, but these people know what pins are. They know what MCUs are. They know what power and ground are..
Not sure how they come to the conclusion to spend 10x more.
Consider the DC motor/stepper feather for example. Perhaps it's $8 worth of components if you're sourcing things piece by piece. Paying a ~$10 premium when you're making a one-off design seems entirely reasonable compared to trying to design a board yourself, waiting for the PCB fab, etc.
I'm an EE and I source plenty from digikey/mouser/etc for personal projects. There's a gap for the occasional prebuilt board, break out board, or oddball electromechanical part (which can be a pain to find at other suppliers). Higher cost distributors like adafruit/sparkfun do have their place even when you have the background.
As a sibling comment noted, a BOM might be $X compared to buying premade packages from Adafruit/Sparkfun at $X0. But paying $X0 means skipping over $X00 worth (or even $X,000) of schematic capture, board layout, design review, PCB fab, assembly, bringup, and fixing bugs.
Here's the deal for me, cost-wise. I can go on Sparkfun, Adafruit, Digikey, Arrow, etc and get these known compatible pieces of essentially Lego that already have firmware support/libraries ready to go. Digikey (who stocks both Adafruit and Sparkfun parts) will have them on my doorstep tomorrow morning. Using the existing libraries, I'll have the a skeleton of a system up and running by tomorrow afternoon. I'll have the prototype up and running in 3 days.
Then, if everything seems to look like it's going to work well and I want to pursue the project further, I'll fire up Eagle or CircuitStudio and lay out a board. Upload it to Macrofab and wait 3 weeks for my fully assembled boards to arrive. And then port the firmware from my prototype over to the assembled boards. Or rewrite the firmware, depending on the quality of the specific sensor libraries.
It's all about bootstrapping the process. When I get a board from Adafruit or Sparkfun, I've got a pretty good belief that it's going to be high quality and fit well within their existing ecosystem of parts and libraries. Building a prototype out of those parts helps de-risk the project and accelerate the project by cutting out most of the up-front dicking around to get it working.
Plus, the vast majority of these boards also have schematics and part numbers provided. When I go to design a real board, I'll use those as references.