Oops, I thought I responded to this. Oh well, better late than never…
Kits are a great idea. I’m into this.
A few options:
-
Easiest is that we can release the board files (Kicad project and gerbers) and BOM for the expanders. That would satisfy people who can order a PCBA from a board house like JLCPCB (and are comfortable sourcing alternative parts if something is out of stock).
-
We probably could re-make the wifi expander as 100% through-hole since it uses the ESP32 for wifi and there are through-hole dev boards for those.
The other expanders cannot be 100% through-hole so we could either:
- Sell a PCB with the SMT parts pre-soldered
- Or, sell the blank PCB and use the widest pitch SMT parts available (SOIC if we’re lucky)
As for total custom expanders:
The button and pot expanders use I2C plus jumpers for address select. The audio expander uses I2C plus I2S. There’s no protocol for the MM to query an expander’s capabilities and then reconfigure the audio engine to accommodate X number of pots, Y number of buttons, Z number of LEDs, etc… Instead, each type of expander is an entity with pre-defined numbers of each. (Don’t both searching for it in the firmware, only the wifi expander is merged into main). Creating your own custom expander would mean modifying the firmware to know how to detect and deal with the new expander.