The use of breakout boards

Description

Never before have there been so many interesting and also inexpensive components from the industry for the hobby electronics engineer. However, many chips or ICs are so small or equipped with special sockets that they are no longer processable for the hobbyist. This annoyed me some years ago. In the meantime, however, there are many interesting chips to buy as a so-called breakout board. Such boards have the chip and some other SMD peripherals already soldered on. A breakout board "breaks out" the chip pins onto a printed circuit board that has its own pins that are spaced perfectly for example for a solderless breadboard, giving you easy access to use the integrated circuit. Produced in large numbers in Asia, these boards are very cheap to buy. Often the breakout boards are adapted to the sizes and interfaces of the Arduino. Surely practical to use, but for me mostly uninteresting, because I mostly want to realize my own MCU environment.
As an example of extremely cheap, but still very interesting breakout boards, I bought the RRD-102 Ver 2.0 board with the RDA5807M and the SEN-MPU6050 with the MPU-6050 chip. With the RDA5807M I try to build a FM receiver and with MPU6050 an earthquake sensor.
Of course these cheap things have disadvantages: Apart from the chip, very cheap components are soldered on, the whole concept for example the ladder routing does not always correspond to the technical specifications, at times real errors can be found. The documentation is often poor and even if a lot of code for programming can be found on the Internet, the wheat must be separated from the chaff very carefully.
All in all, however, this is a very productive field of tinkering for the hobby electronics engineer. Breakout boards (abbreviated BOBS and not BOOBS ;-) are really very practical.

 

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Photos

RRD102a.jpg
RDA8507M
RRD102b.jpg
RRD102 Modul
RRD102c.jpg
Breakout Board
board1.jpg
SEN-MPU6050
board2.jpg
SEN-MPU6050
board3.jpg
Board detail
board4.jpg
MPU-6050

 

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References

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