I have been a hobby PCB designer for maybe 7 years. By hobbyist's standard, I've designed a lot of boards and I enjoy the challenge and fun in the process. Recently I'm having a hard time keeping up with the various hardware upgrades made by Arduino LLC and other companies and cheap breakout boards that flood ebay.
On one hand, I am experienced with lots of components and have lots of tried and working designs so I can easily draw up new designs either for specific projects or for general purpose. On the other hand, breakout boards are so cheap there is no point putting SD card slot, DS3231, ADC chips etc. on a board, when these breakout boards are cheaper than the components they carry such as DS3231 or ADS1115. So what's the point of designing new boards?! It's expensive and takes time, iterations to get perfect.
So one of the solutions I found is to actually incorporating these cheap modules in my designs since they are so easy to acquire and only very few variations exist. I shouldn't resist them!
So I designed an LCD shield that incorporates a common I2C LCD, a common MicroSD card board, a common DS3231 RTC/EEPROM board, and a slot for a common GPS: Adafruit's Ultimate GPS.
I also designed an open-source data logger with commonly available I2C LCDs, MicroSD card board, DS3231/EEPROM, 5V boost converter, and Arduino Nano clone etc.
Then I also designed a board to check these components to ensure they work before soldering them to the boards I designed. Hope this gives you some ideas on YOUR next design.
