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Best of 2019: A SparkFun Year of Firsts
2019 was a huge year for us, and we thank each and every one of you for it!
As a reminder, SparkFun will be closed on Wednesday, January 1. We will reopen at 9 a.m. MT on January 2. Happy New Year from all of us at SparkFun Electronics!
Today is the last day of 2019. We decided to look back at some of what we accomplished this year, and which products you loved most. It's hard to accept that the year is already over (I could barely believe how long ago some 2019 product releases were), because so much happened that made it special.
It was a year of firsts for SparkFun! We began 2019 with a month of new Qwiic® Ecosystem products, including the RedBoard Qwiic, Turbo and GPS-RTK2. Even though the SparkFun Qwiic Ecosystem has been around since 2017, we are now just shy of 100 unique boards, kits and components. If you're curious what products are available as of today, check out our full Qwiic Ecosystem PDF.
Machine learning also made a huge impact in 2019. We released our first machine learning board supported by TensorFlow with the SparkFun Edge, and our first artificial intelligence robotics kit with the JetBot AI Kit with Jetson Nano.
We also created the world's first open source, FCC-certified BLE module with Artemis! We made an individual, mass-market ready module able to be used from prototype to final product, as well as carrier boards with Arduino Uno R3, Arduino Nano, Arduino Mega and Feather-compatible footprints. Heck, we even released a limited-edition SnowBoard version for the holidays!
In September, we collaborated with CU Boulder and Denver Public Schools to create the gator:science Kit for micro:bit, funded by the National Science Foundation. This is an awesome sensor kit that gives students a launch pad to start learning about electronics and data from their environment.
To round out the year, we released our first RISC-V boards with the RED-V RedBoard and RED-V Thing Plus boards, making them one of the most inexpensive and powerful RISC-V boards on the market!
So what did our customers think of our products? These were the top 20 products of 2019, based on quantities purchased.
Like we said, it has been huge year for us and we didn't even cover all of the prototyped products created in SparkX, the contests and giveaways we held or the partnerships we formed.
So what's in store for 2020? We plan to create even more dedicated pages to the topics that interest you most, like the Engineering Essentials, All About LEDs, Building GPS Systems, Distance Sensing and Python pages released this year. We will continue to expand our ever growing Qwiic Ecosystem. Most of all, we plan to continue to innovate new and exciting products for you. Trust us, we have a lot more planned that we can't share just yet, but we expect it to be a monumentally impactful year for us, and for our customers and community.
Let us know what your highlights of the year were. What products, posts and tutorials did you love? What was your favorite Rob video? Ours was his Top Gun tribute! We'll see you next year, and thank you for your ongoing support!
