[theacodes]

Great question! It really depends. If I'm working with a part I haven't ever worked with before, I'll often make a minimal breakout board that I can talk to with a devboard like an Arduino or Feather.

If I'm pretty familiar with everything, I generally dive into a rough PCB layout and debug from there. If I absolutely can't get anything to work, I'll go back to the drawing board and possibly do some little breakouts, for example: https://twitter.com/theavalkyrie/status/1457845661370568709

Edit: for this specific project I did make breakouts for testing the MOSFETs and solenoid drivers. I'm glad I did, since I was able to try out a couple of different options for each: https://twitter.com/theavalkyrie/status/1550878465876004865