Friday Product Post: Plus Ultra!
The new SparkFun ESP32 Thing Plus is here along with another Qwiic Transparent OLED! Let's also take another look at the SparkFun Edge, as well!
Welcome, welcome, welcome, everyone! It's Friday and that means we get to show off all of the new products that we released this last week and we have a lot of big ones to provide you! We start the week off with the new SparkFun Edge Development Board that we announced on Wednesday. We follow that up with the brand new SparkFun ESP32 WROOM Thing Plusm that we hope will open up tons of new IoT project ideas for you! Last up we have the SparkFun Transparent Graphical OLED Breakout with Qwiic (you are definitely going to watch the video for that one)! Now let's jump in to take a closer look at these three new products!
Introducing the SparkFun Edge!
In collaboration with Google and Ambiq, SparkFun's Edge Development Board is based around the newest edge technology and is perfect for getting your feet wet with voice and even gesture recognition without relying on the distant services of other companies. The magic sauce is in the utilization of Ambiq Micro's latest Apollo3 Blue microcontroller whose ultra efficient ARM Cortex-M4F 48MHz (with 96MHz burst mode) processor can run TensorFlow Lite using only 6uA/MHz. Apollo3 Blue sports all the cutting edge features expected of modern microcontrollers including six configurable I2C/SPI masters, two UARTs, one I2C/SPI slave, a 15-channel 14-bit ADC, and a dedicated Bluetooth processor that supports BLE5. On top of all that the Apollo3 Blue has 1MB of flash and 384KB of SRAM memory - plenty for the vast majority of applications.
The SparkFun Edge is now available for pre-order and we expect to begin shipping physical boards by the end of March.
Adding to the Internet of Things family!
The SparkFun ESP32 Thing Plus is the next step to get started with Espressif IoT ideations while still enjoying all the amenities of the original ESP32 Thing. Espressif's ESP32 WROOM is a powerful WiFi and Bluetooth MCU module that targets a wide variety of applications. At the core of this module is the ESP32-D0WDQ6 chip which is designed to be both scalable and adaptive. To make the Thing Plus even easier to use, we've moved a few pins around to make the board Feather compatible and it utilizes our handy Qwiic Connect System which means no soldering or shields are required to connect it to the rest of your system!
It's game over, man! GAME OVER!
The future is here! The SparkFun Qwiic Transparent Graphical OLED Breakout allows you to display custom images on a transparent screen using either SPI or I2C connections. Brilliantly lit in the dark and still visible by daylight, this OLED sports a display area of 128x64 pixels, 128x56 of which are completely transparent. Utilizing our handy Qwiic system, no soldering is required to connect it to the rest of your system making it easy to get started with your own images. However, we still have broken out 0.1"-spaced pins in case you prefer to use a breadboard.
That's it for this week! As always, we can't wait to see what you make! Shoot us a tweet @sparkfun, or let us know on Instagram or Facebook. We’d love to see what projects you’ve made!
We'll be back next week with even more fantastic new products!
Thank you for making the ESP32 WROOM Feather compatible! Soldering those little Qwiic connectors on a Feather adapter board was a challenge for my old eyes.
PURUSUU URUTORAAAA ( tried for the katakana, but it wouldn't render properly :/ )