Do We Really Need Another Development Board?

A hardware maker is reconsidering the standard 2.54mm pitch development board form factor, exploring a system-on-module (SoM) approach with 1mm pitch headers and castellated edges — similar to the Raspberry Pi compute module. This design would break out more ESP32 or other MCU pins in less space, allow carrier boards to handle cheap components while the module holds expensive ones, and make carrier board revisions cheaper. The tradeoff is added complexity compared to existing ESP32 modules, but the approach could benefit designs using STM32 or RP MCUs across multiple boards.