July 17th was a big day for SparkFun - we released our 100th and 101st Qwiic-capable boards! This centennial achievement has been in the works for the last three years. Nate developed the first Qwiic boards for SparkX in April 2017, and since then it has accelerated and evolved into the massively popular ecosystem that it is today.
Some of the first Qwiic boards including the Qwiic Shield for Arduino, MMA8452Q Accelerometer, and Qwiic Adapter.
If you are unfamiliar, the SparkFun Qwiic Connect System is an ecosystem of I2C sensors, actuators, shields, cables and more, that make prototyping faster and less prone to error. All Qwiic-enabled boards use a common 1 mm pitch, 4-pin JST connector. This reduces the amount of required PCB space, and polarized connections mean you can’t hook it up wrong. The Qwiic Connect System is designed to keep your projects moving.
You can control Qwiic sensors and accessory boards with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, NVIDIA Jetson Nano, RISC-V, micro:bit and more. Qwiic boards can operate via WiFi and Bluetooth with ESP32 or XBee. With Qwiic you can daisy-chain multiple boards together to form new circuits all without a single point of soldering. Pretty much every new board SparkFun creates has a Qwiic connector on it (provided that it has I2C capabilities).
We are very proud of reaching 101 unique boards in the Qwiic ecosystem (and that doesn't even include the 15 kits and 10 cable/connector options), and we'll keep producing Qwiic boards, kits, and accessories (new ones this week!), as well as helping other businesses and partners create their own Qwiic boards!
What have you created with Qwiic? Tell us about the projects you've made with Qwiic in the comments below. Here's to the next 100 Qwiic boards!
Congratulations! It's great to see the variety!
I know that our friends over at Adafruit have also climbed on the bandwagon (with their "STEMMA QT" line). I think it would be interesting to see a list of other folks who have Qwiic compatible stuff available!
You know, it is nice that Adafruit does typically provide 'Qwiic' attribution. I even see a few Sparkfun boards for sale over there.
What I'd like to see is Sparkfun start reselling Adafruit Qwiic-enabled boards and kits. Sure there's some overlap, but Adafruit appears to be pretty prolific. Often times I'm caught managing what I want from SF vs what I want from Ada and how I can save shipping costs.
Being on the west coast, I'd certainly gravitate to buying primarily from SF - shorter shipping times and a friendlier free shipping policy
I do wonder what kind professional rivalry and competition exists between the two companies. SF sure could load up Ada with GPS kits.
While I love soldering... the Qwiic system saves a lot of time. I do not have to worry about stripping wires to the exact size, solder the plated through holes, clean the joints, and troubleshooting. Instead, I get work on more projects! ^_^
Yay Qwiic!
That's awesome! I love your Qwiic line!
P.S. - Y'all are in the top 3 best electronics retailers :)