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The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

learn.adafruit.com

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Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

#31

Post by totalZero »

deregulateMed wrote: post #28
zeta0134 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quality control, time, etc. Just because you are a bricklayer doesn't mean you have to build your own fireplace.

Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

#32

Post by fundamental »

deregulateMed wrote: post #26

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.

Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

#33

Post by ChrisGammell »

fundamental wrote: post #32
deregulateMed wrote: post #26

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…

Hear hear. Buying a proven working board is a tool I have in my toolbelt that I can test against.

Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

#34

Post by igneo676 »

neur4lnet wrote: post #11

Is there a reason that the main board is a feather and the daughter boards are wings? I would have expected 1 wing to have many feathers, not the other way around.

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

Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

#35

Post by huanwin »

deregulateMed wrote: post #26

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.

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.

Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

#36

Post by OnACoffeeBreak »

deregulateMed wrote: post #30
jmrm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

#37

Post by dimatura »

BoorishBears wrote: post #23
wdfx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

#38

Post by psychomugs »

deregulateMed wrote: post #26

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.

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.

Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

#39

Post by dimatura »

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?

Time and effort?

Re: The Adafruit Feather and FeatherWing System

#40

Post by polishdude20 »

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)

https://github.com/AdamMarciniak/CygnusX1

The schematics on the adafruit site helped me design my board and wire it all up properly!

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