The Raspberry Pi 3 board is a powerful SBC board. But despite its power, it's still a big, thick board for certain projects. This is why many users are looking for smaller alternatives like the Pi Zero versions of the Raspberry Pi.
The downside of this use is the reduction in power or the loss of functions such as the ethernet port or the amount of ram memory that we can have. This problem has been seen by the Pimoroni company that has created a slimmed down model of the Raspberry Pi 3.
The thickness of the Raspberry Pi 3 is still very high, but the most striking thing is that the ports that increase the thickness of the board can be omitted without losing functionality. In this aspect, the bluetooth and wifi module play a fundamental role that allow us to connect the mouse, keyboard and Internet connection without the need for classic ports. The microusb port can function as a storage device together with the microsd card slot. The most interesting of all is that we don't need to buy a new Raspberry Pi 3 board or anything similar, just have a Raspberry Pi board and be a handyman with the soldering iron.
Pimoroni's project is nothing new, but it is true, that is the minimal expression of Raspberry Pi 3 successfully. There are other projects like the one published a long time ago by the NODE website, where they removed the ethernet port and some USB port, but there were other parts that increased the size of the Raspberry Pi.
In this project, such parts also disappear and make this SBC board even thinner. In the video you can see how to create this type of plate, but we must note that we have to know very well how to handle these boards because otherwise we will disable the Raspberry Pi forever.
I personally think it's an interesting project, but I wouldn't risk breaking the board if I don't really have serious space issues. And when in doubt, we can always turn to the Pi Zero W, which is a less powerful but slimmer solution.