Dave Darko Has Designed a Fully Through-Hole Feather Board, and Isn't It Ironic?

What imagery comes to mind when you hear the word Feather?

Lightweight? Delicate? Filigree?

Dave Darko hears "simple," and executes that vision to great effect, with his latest project; the Sarcastic Feather!

Quoting the often quibbled words of a certain set of lyrics by Alanis Morissette, we can kind of see the meaning in the text hidden away below the ATmega package.

The Feather boards are the some of the smaller form factor development boards available on the market, so there's some tongue-in-cheek humor in designing one to used all PTH parts!

Initially designed as a standalone project, the board has suitably found its way to becoming an entry in the rather apt Hackaday "Making Tech At Home" Challenge, where the simple BoM and construction lend themselves very nicely to being assembled on even the most rudimentary electronics bench!

Even the USB connector has taken a simplified approach. Yeah, you can get mini-USB connectors that are PTH, but Darko has chosen to eschew the familiar and common-place micro-USB, stepping back in time beyond the mini-USB variants, and has doubled-down on the old-school look and feel of this board, by specifying a USB-B connector — how's that for a blast from the past?!

There's not a lot to this board, and that works just fine for us — there's a lot to be said for simplicity in this day and age.

With the EAGLE board and schematic files available from the project page, there is very little reason for you not to pick up a small bag of parts, an order from OSH Park, and get chasing that old school aesthetic.

We'd suggest picking them up in the OSH Park After Dark service, to let that gold bad black hatch shine through — it really nails the look that we feel Darko is going for!

You can follow along with Darko on Twitter here, or check his Instagram for more photos.