I actually love using Falstad, it's fairly simple which is great because usually I just want to look at the ideal behavior of things to get the circuit working before I worry about the exact characteristics of every part.
Also, I like that I can clearly see which way it's supposed to plug in.
And if there's a genuine Arduino Nano on the top headers, it's kinda weird to have 2 different ports on the same board. Obviously there are tons of compatible boards with different plugs.
That being said, these are just excuses to back up my emotional decision. I just really like USB Mini.
And I know most people don't have USB Mini cables laying around so I provide a hand painted and glittered pink cable with these.
Do you have a tracking bug for this? I could see PCIe pcb edge on the top and left with female straddle mount recepticles on the bottom and right. Another option would be something like pmod, fewer pins available but cheap and easy.
It would be nice to hear a bunch of ideas about it, because at this point I haven't given it too much thought.
My thinking is to use something like this, maybe with a separate tiny PCB to connect between both boards because I don't want to mess up the general outline of the board.
The best possible version of this that I can imagine would allow for two boards to mate in all possible directions, you might want to go with a 'slave' expansion board that ties on to the first module in E/S/W but not N, another alternative would be to physically connect them to each other resulting in immediate connections between all boards. Lots of possibilities here. Something like i^c might help connecting the boards on a very cheap bus to allow for the configuration and read-out of slave boards, higher speed interaction would require a free set of 'edges' that can be connected between adjacent boards.
The main thing is that without any strain relief like on a bare PCB like this, USB mini seems to hold up better for almost psychological reasons. The shape makes you tend to plug it in straight and put less pressure at an up/down angle.
I actually love USB-C for similar reasons, but sending USB 2.0 signals and power over USB-C feels weirdly misleading and janky nowadays.
That being said, I’m literally the guy whose semi-fringe opinions about USB ports you’re discussing, so I have a clear bias.
Fun fact, the first popular modern breadboards with power supplies and switches and stuff we use today were $1,300 in 1974 dollars, so ~$9,855 today accounting for inflation.
Also, I’m the guy who made this and you’re absolutely spot on. I’m constantly working on making this better and cheaper as time goes on. It’s totally open source so I hope people will write firmware to do the things they want with it and share it with others who want to do that thing as well.
I've been watching your project from inception and I think you're on to something, keep doing this and you'll definitely go places. Also: I'd suggest contacting the Adafruit people, they're right in your sweet spot and may have both good product ideas around what you're doing and a massive audience and market. On top of that they're nice.
Hey thanks! Yeah this blew up really quickly, I have a batch of 50 coming which at the time seemed like a lot, now I have 500 preorders from this week. So yeah that's a great tip if I ever plan on improving the actual project instead of packing boxes all day forever. I'll do that.
