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.
The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System
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Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System
#22I’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.
Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System
#23Earlier 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?
Sounds like you misunderstand what a breakout board is?
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.
Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System
#24First time I ever saw one of these was in this neat little project: https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book
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.
Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System
#25Earlier 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?
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.
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...
Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System
#26I 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.
Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System
#27I 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.
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.
Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System
#28I 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.
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.
Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System
#29I 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.
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.
Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System
#30I 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.
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.
I was more saying that you buy the components and put the pieces together according to the datasheet.