We saw this Tweet “The Feather pinout is fast becoming the standard” and while we did not set out for this to be any type of standard, the Adafruit Feather and Feather Wing became really popular (See “A Quick Rundown on Adafruit’s Feather Ecosystem” – MAKE & “The State of Boards: Small, Simple Hardware Rules” – MAKE).

And not just for our 100+ boards (they’re open-source!), but also for an entire ecosystem of partners and makers, making Wings.

We asked Maxim and Particle why they chose Adafruit Feather Wing compatibility for their latest hardware offerings, here’s what they had to say (Maxim has 2 FeatherWing compatible boards, MAX32620 & MAX32630FTHR).

“We needed to create a controller platform to demonstrate some of our sensors and other peripherals. We also wanted it to be useable as a development platform for our microcontrollers. We needed something very flexible to support the wide variety of products that Maxim offers. With many of our recent products focused on ultra-portable/wearable applications, it also needed to be compact and battery friendly. After looking at all the various prototyping form factors on the market at the time, we decided to follow the feather form factor developed by Adafruit. The feather form factor is compact and battery powered, making it ideal for wearable prototyping. It has a dual row 100 mil pitch header that is compatible with breadboards and stacking headers for ultimate ease of use. It is small enough to be embedded as a controller on a larger board, but also complete enough to be the host board for a sensor or peripheral module. The biggest differentiator was the variety of off-the-shelf wings available for the board so that we could mix and match features like displays with our demos.”

Greg Steiert
Principal MTS, Applications
Maxim Integrated | www.maximintegrated.com

“We chose the Adafruit Feather form factor because of how thoughtfully it was designed. The footprint is just right, the ecosystem of Wings covers all the bases, and it was carefully designed to ensure the boards are all compatible with one another despite a huge variety of microcontrollers and accessories. Also, Adafruit is awesome.”

Zach Supalla
Founder and CEO
‎Particle | particle.io

Are you interested in making something that works with the Adafruit Feather & FeatherWing system? That’s awesome! Here’s some guidelines to make it easy to make sure you can mix & match in the nearly-100-board ecosystem. We have a handy Feather spec that will make sure what you design works with the whole family!

Here are some ‘Wings in the wild’ we’ve seen, if we missed any, post up in the comments!

Octo Level Shifter FeatherWing by Evil Genius Labs.

“I chose the layout for the same reasons listed by Particle and Maxim Integrated: it’s well-designed, highly-compatible and open, and because Adafruit is awesome!”

ATM90E26 FeatherWing by Whatnick INC.

Three-phase Energy Monitor – ATM90E36 Featherwing by Whatnick INC.

PewPew Lite FeatherWing by Radomir Dopieralski.

LoraWAN FeatherWing by Dan Watson

CAN FeatherWing by Armin

Update: 5/6/18 – Hackaday! Comments have some makers/hackers planning or making more wings’