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Sexy sexy sexy!
I am in favor of 12 extra pins over a 1cm board size reduction - without those pins, you'd have what? 16 GPIO pins? That's just not enough, imo (*). Are those 4 holes near the USB connector breakouts for the USB pins? I don't see those being very useful for most people (assuming there's an accessible GND/vbat somewhere).
For someone stuffing the board into a solderless breadboard or perf board, maybe it would make sense to ensure that those middle pins would be the ones for use with WiFi/Ethernet modules - I'm envisioning the pins being put facing the opposite way in those holes, so the WiFi module could ride on top of the EspruinoMini as it sat in the perf board... That'd be neat, for sure.
The internet sales tax gravy train is gonna end sooner or later. It's thanks only to political gridlock that they haven't closed that loophole already.
- - On the Espruino 1v3, one could argue that it has more pins than it needs, particularly given the memory limit - I doubt one could fit code that would use all 40-odd pins without running out of memory even with 3250 jsvars. 16 GPIO pins only is too far in the other direction, though - that's into pin-starvation land. Stick a keypad on it, and bam, there's half your IO, gone!
- - On the Espruino 1v3, one could argue that it has more pins than it needs, particularly given the memory limit - I doubt one could fit code that would use all 40-odd pins without running out of memory even with 3250 jsvars. 16 GPIO pins only is too far in the other direction, though - that's into pin-starvation land. Stick a keypad on it, and bam, there's half your IO, gone!
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DrAzzy
So what's below is what I have so far. You'll have to excuse the soldering - 0403 parts are a bit tricky :)
It's got:
It's got pretty much every pin brought out but having played with it I'm reconsidering that now... If you imagine that there were just the two strips of pins down the edges it could be made almost 1cm shorter - and if you're using protoboard then the pins going across are effectively useless anyway.
As far as price, I haven't costed it up fully but it's designed to be easier to manufacture than the Espruino board. I'm aiming for something around £15 each on the KickStarter, maybe a bit more afterwards (as distributors need their cut too).
I totally miscalculated the US suggested retail price of the original Espruino board (sales tax is added afterwards in the US) so distributors are making a much higher margin there. Hopefully I'll get it right with this new board and it'll compete more sensibly with the Arduino Micro.