I am a huge fan of the Break-out-Board concept and have bought dozens of them from SFW already and have even had some of my own design made. Two things strike me as obvious opportunities to improve them, though, so I thought I’d share:
-
Every BoB that has a built-in voltage regulator should break out both the HV in and the LV out. This allows you to bypass the regulator if you don’t need it, and it allows you to make use of the lower voltage elsewhere in your circuit. It requires 1 extra pin on the BoB, but I’ve needed this (requested here <http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/produc … cts_id=519>), and it has also been requested by vivi here <https://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/produ … cts_id=691>
-
SFE should come up with a few standard pinouts where possible. I was thinking of a SPI-BoB standard and an I2C-BoB standard where pins one through ‘N’ are consistent across products, and only the pins > ‘N’ are specific to the chip being broken out. For instance, SPI-BoB would have power, ground, MISO, MOSI, SCK, and one CS as the first 6 pins, and pins 7+ would be for chip-specific details like interrupts, analog lines, etc.
The reason I want #2 is that I sometimes layout my own boards, but I want to be able to drop in an SFE BoB to expand it (say, a Nordic module). I can add a socket for the Nordic module, but that is all I can ever plug in there. If I could wire the first six pins as generic power+SPI and then have another 6 pins routed to a prototyping area, then I can trivially attach other BoBs. Obviously, I can do this now by wiring the whole socket to a prototyping area, but it seems like SPI and I2C are so prevalent that it is worth standardizing.
[EDIT]Oh, and I realize that such standards won’t always work, so I would assume they would only be used on BoBs where they are a natural fit.[/EDIT]
Thanks for listening,
- Dean