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.
 RDA8507M |
 RRD102 Modul |
 Breakout Board |
|
 SEN-MPU6050 |
 SEN-MPU6050 |
 Board detail |
 MPU-6050 |
