Our New KickStarter! Espruino Pico

Problem is, people do hate change. Every time I say I'm changing something (even when it's good) someone complains :)

Boo! Hiss! What a terrible idea! Down with Gordon!

But seriously, that's an interesting idea, I think I'm sold. If you can find space to route the traces, this has a few advantages over the sideways pins. Being able to get GND and VCC onto the header makes doing an expansion board so much easier. On the downside, everyone and their mom has 0.1" pin header, while 1.27mm/0.05" is less common. Looks like that won't be a problem though - despite that I don't think I've ever seen any, a search of ebay turns up plenty of results from the usual suspects.

Female pinheader isn't break-off, but it looks like the relevant sizes are available - digikey (though not ebay sellers, it seems) sells 2x5, 2x6, and 2x7 blocks of 1.27 female pin header - albeit at a steep price (1.50 or so each for 6x2- what's that, 13 cents a pin? ). One can always just cut up the long pieces, and file the ends down so they don't look too crappy. I'd think the female headers should go onto the Pico, on the side opposite whichever one we chose to have the 0.1" pins sticking out from. (female to reduce risk of shorting together VCC and GND - since it'll be on the opposite side as the pins you're probably paying attention to, I think there'd be a higher risk of accidental shorts with male header - plus, you want the addons to use the cheaper male header, right?). You should probably make a decision about what the "right" way around for the pins will be, so we could use eachothers' shield designs.

And - not to be a nudge - did you check regarding replacing the pads for the crystal with holes? The holes can (and probably should) be smaller than most through holes, since the 32 Khz crystals in the can packages have such thin leads - this looks like it might even take less board space than the pads.

Playing with the board image in paint for a bit, it looks like fitting a 1.27mm 2 row header between the board edge and the resonator will be the hard part, more than routing the traces...

And yeah, I think if you could get an SPI, I2C, and UART on there, that'd be critical to making "shields" possible, since you don't know what you'll need for a given piece of hardware. Plus, you want some extra pins for ADC's and chip select and such. I think 2x6 would be preferable... but not sure if it could be crammed in.

Finally: Aw yeah, those pledges been coming in - looks like we're gonna have HID emulation ! I did my part, i'm in the 10-board club - and if even half the rest of the backers upgraded their pledge like I did, we'd have inline C! :-P