Compact Pico's (request)

[espruino-discuss3]

Posted at 2017-02-09 by CriscoCrusader

For me, the USB tab on the Espruino Pico is more of a space penalty than useful. I assume this design reduces unit cost. But if possible, a version of the Pico which has the female micro USB port, like the Espruino Wifi has, would be more optimal, as it would save a little space. For wearables, this is a legitimate consideration.

Please let me know if you think of any creative options available to me right now. This request is more of a nice-to-have than blocker, for my project.

Thanks for all the excellent work. Espruino is truly amazing! I don't think my project would be as quick and successful without Espruino. Looking forward to sharing our success and application with Espruino more in the future.

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2017-02-09 by @gfwilliams

On the back of the Pico there is space for a Mini USB connector (sadly I had to remove the Micro USB because of issues with Apple's non-standard extension leads) - so you could take off a little of the USB plug and solder a connector on the back once you've scraped the solder resist off?

If you're interested, on the Pico removing the plug was actually for three reasons:

• Unprotected Micro USBs can be fragile - before I moved to the 4 hole through-hole type, I ended up having to replace quite a lot of original Espruino boards where the plug had been pulled away from the board :(
• It's staggering just how many broken Micro USB cables are out there - I think many of those USB power banks ship with leads that don't contain data wires, and I was getting a lot of support requests from people who just had broken wires. At least this way on most PCs you can shove it in the USB hole directly and can easily see if it is the extension lead.
• I'm expected more people to use the Pico as a 'smart plug' - soldering wires onto it for some device and then plugging it straight into USB - that hasn't happened as much as I'd though actually :)

As it happens, while you save some money by not having a plug, the board costs more because it's thicker, so realistically it's not much of a cost saving :)

ST have some very impressive chips in the same form factor (STm32F412/3) coming up, so perhaps I could look at a new board - but right now it's quite low priority I'm afraid - an nRF52 based board will probably come first.