What is your honest take on the "Stamp-Sized" Dev Board trend? (Xiao, QT Py, etc

[zapkinus]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been following the trend of ultra-small, 'stamp-sized' development boards like the Seeed Studio Xiao, Adafruit QT Py, and DFRobot Beetle. They are everywhere now, but I’m curious about how the community actually uses them beyond simple blinking LED projects.

Prototyping vs. Production: Do you see these as just 'hobbyist toys,' or do you actually use them as modules (SMT mounting via castellated holes) in semi-professional or production-grade projects?

The "Lazy" Engineer Route: Does anyone else use these specifically to avoid the headache of designing 4-layer PCBs or dealing with complex MCU soldering/crystal routing on their main board? Is it a valid shortcut or 'cheating'?

The Missing Piece: Most of these use SAMD21, ESP32-C3, or RP2040. Do you ever feel limited by the lack of higher-performance MCU families (like certain STM32s) or integrated battery management in this specific form factor?

I'm trying to decide if I should dive deeper into this 'modular dev board' workflow for my next few projects. What are the pros and cons you've experienced?

Thanks for the insight!

 

[Minder]

Not really qualifies as "Stamp Size" but I have recently started using a Pi5 for compact Hi-tech project, uses Python to program, and quite the following forums out there!.

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/

My previous projects were MicroChip based using assembly. So quite the change.

 

[danadak]

Using ESP32-C3 super mini and ESP32-S3 super mini for internet sensor client nodes to serve data to
a central ESP32 server serving web page.

Love them, especially S3 as its dual core.