"Wouldn't it be great if, instead of collecting shields, HATs, PMODs, Clicks, Booster Packs, Props... you could have a cross-compatible platform? Something that doesn't force you into one chipset? and allows you to mix-and-match the microcontroller, wireless protocol, and functional extensions?
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."
I've never gotten the obsession with prescribing form factors to breakout boards.
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?
You haven't lost anything. It's about what others can gain. Meaning, those who don't (yet) know how to make their own boards or dont care how the interfaces work can still plug a couple of boards together and make a working system.
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?
Actually there are more beginner-friendly standards in the hobbyist electronic space. Using an i2c plug standard like Sparkfun’s Qwiic QT / Adafruit’s STEMMA QT (which are mostly compatible) avoids soldering, but you’re limited to the i2c parts that they have breakout boards for.
I don't think it takes "0" more knowledge. Maybe 2-5% more knowledge? (In some made-up subjective scale).
If you buy a feather and a wing you know they'll work together (I haven't looked up every feather-wing combination, but the only exception I've seen is large OLEDs which technically work with low-powered feathers, but not very well - and they spell this out clearly in the product description). Not necessarily the case for a random MCU and breakout board, and figuring out needs at least a little bit of knowledge.
Same for connecting the boards. There's pretty much one way to connect a feather and a wing so you don't have to think about 5V/3V, SPI pins, RX/TX, etc. Or weird small connectors. Again, not super hard to figure out with arbitrary breakouts, but requires more than 0 knowledge.
Their form factor places literally no role in their compatibility.
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.
Form factors matter for electronics that need to fit into small spaces. It’s a tradeoff between size and ease of assembly.
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.
They've had the feather boards for a while but not the wings. After they needed to expand the brand, they were probably a bit limited in choices by the original name
Scanning quickly down the page to the first schematics as I did, I thought "but this thing's tiny? and so arbitraily-sized!", so scrolled back up a wee bit.
Ah, of course. Inches.
Stuff this scale should be drawn in millimetres, imho. Keep inches for tables and chairs.
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.
The adafruit documentation is top notch! I've been working on a project for a thrust vectoring rocket using the same chip that's on the feather m4 (the SAMD 51)
I’m have the stm32 Feather on my desk right now. I use Micropython and it works out just fine. I prefer a raspberry pie zero w though honestly. I can ssh right to it and edit python with vim right on the device. I know the pi isn’t “hard real time” but the servos and sensors I’m using on a rocket don’t seem to care.
Power consumption and sleep capabilities are also drastically different, not just the hard-realtime. After all the RPi Zero W runs a complete "desktop" OS, while the feathers run a single compiled executable directly on the hardware.
I give my EE friends a weird look when I see they bought stuff from Adafruit.
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.
Time is expensive. So, you can find parts elsewhere for much less, but it can take a while to find an equivalent option setup for prototyping. It's not as much of an issue if you've got a stack of blank SMD breakout boards. If you're doing some DIY work and you can find out someone's already designed a module that fits your needs, then why not.
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.
Have you considered they might be trading off on aspects that you don't care or don't know about?
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.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. You're misguided, but have reasonable questions!
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.
Making your own hardware only for tinkering it's pretty painful. I think it's better to make a functional prototype in a board like that, and then making your own board of you need to.
Selecting components according to data sheets, capturing the schematic, designing the PCB, designing mechanical components/enclosures, ordering components, ordering bare PCBs, assembling PCBs, bringing up the PCB takes time and is not foolproof. If you're looking to prototype or to make something in small quantities for your own use, it is much faster and less error prone to order something like this.
This is tantamount to saying that every degree-holding MechE should do all of their car maintenance and home improvement and design their own products. Genuine passion for engineering and a healthy dash of imposter syndrome impel me to handle as much of this as I can, but I don't hold it against others who don't.
Could it be curation? I'm still a novice myself so this comes from a place of genuine ignorance, but I find most of the channels for parts and whatnot to be overwhelmingly complex. Adafruit is dead simple to search.
You are an EE? You should know the major websites like digikey and mouser. They are really easy to search. They have tons of categories to narrow your search if you need something specific.
Feathers are primarily microcontrollers--Atmel AVR, ARM Cortex M0/M4, ESP32, etc. Stuff with kilobytes of memory and low megahertz of speed. None of them can run ROS or any Linux-based OS/RTOS hybrid.
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."