Espruino Pico Adaptor PCBs

No they are all ok - no exposed vias as I can see.

Great - it's a per-board setting in Eagle, and I think sometimes I forgot to tweak it.

I'm still really interested in an 'uber-shim' with snap-out parts for common devices. I wonder what the most common/useful ones would be?

• HC-05/HM-10 bluetooth (maybe on end of board)
  
• ESP8266 - ESP-01 and ESP-12
  
• Micro SD card (on end of board again)
  
• WIZnet ethernet (tweaked to put the Pico on the opposite side)
  
• MAX1551 LiPo charger IC
  
• Arduino (could add too much to the cost though)
  
• FETs or ULN2003 IC - for high current drive
  
• NRF24 (I wonder how many people are using this now?)
  

As I wrote you by mail - I want exactly to make such a pcb.
For my next project I'll need a board for the pico to use MicroSD, BLE and ESP8266.

Ahh, but you want to use all at once :)

The plan here is to sell a single PCB, but to allow the user to snap it up into several different PCBs, all of which are Shims in their own right.

Ah I see - ok - yes this is really a different board :D
But good idea to make a alround shim

Jorgen: Have you seen the protoboard I'm selling on Tindie? since you're looking into making a shim that holds... a lot of stuff... something like this might be useful (I don't know in what quantity you're thinking of working)

@DrAzzy your protoboard is awesome.
But for the "final" board I want it smaller and only modules on, that I really need.
But for testing this looking really good.

just order 2 proto boards on Tindie (#31269)

Awesome, thanks! I'll get those mailed out tonight.

That's exactly what it's meant for - testing and development, and one-off projects where making a specialized board is hard to justify. I don't know if others do, but I end up with a lot of often very crude boards being used for a specific purpose (like, ATTiny85/841 grade stuff). I've done one project of that sort with this kind of project board, and it went together a lot faster.

Thx @DrAzzy - looking forward to play with the boards

@DrAzzy thx for shipping them so fast.
The boards just arrived - hope to get some time tomorrow to solder something on ;)

The small footprint is part of what I love about the pico. But it would be really nice to lower the barrier to expansion. What about a stackable shield arrangement?

Good idea - I think I probably lost sight of this amongst the other options out there.

I guess ideally there would be several different versions of the adaptor 'shims' - I already have about 3 different versions for WiFi, but having one that just used the 0.1" pins in a 'stackable' way would be great - same for the other devices.

Unfortunately the 0.05" pins on the end can't easily be used - the headers for them are shorter, so don't align with the 0.1" ones. However for a lot of people it wouldn't be such a big deal giving up 2 of the 14 0.1" IOs in order to get WiFi.

@Gordon another adapter board that might be worth making/modifying is an Arduino adapter board with a spot to solder on an esp8266. I've been using the Arduino adapter board with success, but I'm not sure if it's possible to solder down a pico with the esp8266 adapter already soldered onto the pico.

Good point... There's plenty of space on there. You'd have to use up a few of the Arduino pins for it though as I don't think there are any spare on the Pico.

Shame really - I sent the next batch off to be made just last week!

I reckon you could put the ESP8266 on there, but you'd need some 0.05" pin strip so you can mount the shim above the Pico rather than underneath it. It'd definitely be a bit fiddly!