brainstorming: number of pins / usability #205
Description
Thank you for a very nice product, first I want to say that I love the OLA and the following is not a criticism, rather trying to think about how a future version could be even better.
Just some brainstorming about the number of pins available and resulting usability.
The OLA is super convenient as it combines a nice MCU, micro SD card, power management, RTC capability, IMU, qwiic port, in a small board. This means that "advanced" users may quickly want to use it as a board for which they write their own firmware to do specific things, as this is much easier and more compact than buying a RedBoardArtemis, adding a SD card breakout, etc. There is just one painful point: the number of broken out pins. It would be very nice if more currently non-connected pins from the MCU could be broken in a future version, so that the board can be used to do more advanced / more things. "Obvious" things would be for example providing a SPI port separate from the microSD one, some more I2C and serial ports, some ADC pins, etc.
Naturally, the board is very dense already. I think there could be a few directions:
- use smaller / denser holes instead of the standard PCB ones, so more pins can be gathered on the available header area?
- make the board slightly bigger (this would be just a few more mm), so that "castellated pcb holes" can be added
- add a "proper" connector that packs very many pins in a small footprint, and the user would just buy the cable if they need access to these pins