Behind the Scenes: Making a SparkFun Board
If you're curious what goes into producing a SparkFun Original board, check out our new video!
Every so often we like to share what it takes to build a board from beginning to end. When our friends at QuickLogic asked us to show what it took to produce the new SparkFun QuickLogic Thing Plus FPGA board (announced and backed in March on Crowd Supply and releasing tomorrow!) we thought it would be a fantastic opportunity to put together a video showing you what happens on our production floor on a daily basis! This was a fun board to design and build, and we're excited to share a look at the steps we take to turn a PCB into an FPGA.
Making the SparkFun QuickLogic Thing Plus
The SparkFun QuickLogic Thing Plus releases tomorrow, July 23rd. This board is powered by QuickLogic’s EOS S3, the first eFPGA-enabled Arm Cortex©-M4F MCU to be fully supported with Zephyr RTOS and FreeRTOS. Unlike other development boards based on proprietary hardware and software tools, the QuickLogic Things Plus is based on 100 percent open source hardware, is compatible with the Feather form factor, and is built around 100 percent open source software (with support for FreeRTOS, Zephyr, nMingen, Docker and SymbiFlow). Come back tomorrow to order yours!
Wow! Wave solder machines have sure changed since I first encountered them in about 1976...