The additional castellated vias on Evo M51 are a big benefit to the this board footprint, significantly expanding the I/O capabilities of the board. However, for the purposes of prototyping and early product design, they can admittedly be a bit challenging to work with.
For that reason, we are preparing to offer EvoTray – a simple breakout board for Evo M51.
The first PCB protos have arrived, and here’s a quick picture of one from the lab bench:
Here’s a little Photoshop magic to show roughly how the Evo board will mount to the EvoTray. This is with one of our recent Evo M51 proto boards.
And, yes, the JST and STEMMA QT connectors took a bit of a hit in the oven on this one. But we are moving to different connectors for production.