Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

learn.adafruit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 45 posts

Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

#14

Post by detritus »

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.

Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

#15

Post by voxadam »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #5
daly wrote: post #3

Wouldn't it be great if feathers, PMODs, etc. all used ROS2 to provide publish/subscribe and services so that anything could "just work"?

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.

micro-ROS[1] is an option for resource constrained devices.

[1] https://micro.ros.org/

Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

#16

Post by powerpiglet »

detritus wrote: post #14

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.

It's meant to be breadboard-compatible, and breadboard pin sockets are normally spaced at 0.1 inch.

You can see in the first schematic that it's 0.9" by 2.0", which gives you 9x20 hole positions.

Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

#18

Post by skybrian »

wdfx wrote: post #10
BoorishBears wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-adafruit-stemma-qt/sp...

Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

#19

Post by skybrian »

BoorishBears wrote: post #8
Bluestein wrote: post #2

"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 (Feathe…

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?

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.

Post reply on HN