There are already a lot of development board shapes for microcontrollers. So when a new idea pops up—especially another one with headers and breakouts—it makes you pause. Misryoum newsroom is looking at a concept that basically asks: do we really need another dev board, or are we just adding another brick to the pile?
The pitch starts with a familiar problem. Most MCU dev boards lean on that ubiquitous 2.54 mm (0.1″) pin header pitch, mostly because it plays nicely with traditional 2.54 mm breadboards. But the thinking here is that the “pile” might be getting a bit too comfortable. What if, instead of another incremental variation of the same form factor, you moved closer to a system-on-module approach?
In this concept, the direction is closer to the Raspberry Pi compute module style: use a 1 mm pitch for the headers, add castellated edges so it can be treated as an SMT part if needed, and break out more of the onboard ESP32 module’s pins in a much tighter footprint. The idea is that you could fit a lot more connectivity without turning the board into a small country.
Misryoum editorial desk notes the core advantage is the familiar SoM split: keep the “tedious cheap stuff” on a carrier board, and put the more expensive-to-manufacture pieces on a self-contained module. That way, if you mess up—because everyone messes up at least once—you redo the cheaper board instead of the whole thing. It also kind of blurs the line between something breadboard-friendly and something closer to a fully custom PCB.
There’s also the counterargument, and it’s not hard to see why people would bring it up. After all, an ESP32 module already exists as a module, and it already has a finer pitch. But if you need more than what the module offers out of the box—or you want to standardize across boards using an STM32 or RP MCU—this tighter SoM-style approach could still make sense. Actually… maybe it’s more about flexibility than convenience.
And yes, the “1 mm pitch breadboard” angle is tempting. The notion of breadboarding at that scale sounds kind of nerdy in a good way. In the moment, you can almost imagine the solder fumes (and that faint, warm electronics smell) while you try to justify why you’re not just using a 2.54 mm setup like everyone else.
So the question Misryoum is left with feels simple, even if the implications aren’t: are we chasing usefulness with this, or just chasing novelty? What are your thoughts on this matter?
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