Have you heard about our very own skunkworks division run by SparkFun founder, Nathan Siedle? To put it simply, SparkX products are rapidly produced to bring you the most cutting edge technology as it becomes available. If you've looked at the top of our home page any time this last week, you might have noticed that SparkX released two new USB-type boards over the last few days.
Do you want to be able to measure what current your board is drawing in real time? Maybe it is a board that draws short bursts of current? Or maybe you want to investigate what in-rush current your board draws? If so, the SparkX USB Current Sensor is the board for you!
The on-board TI INA290 is an ultra-precise current sense amplifier that can measure voltage drops across shunt resistors over a wide common-mode range. The INA290A1 on our board has a gain of 20 Volts per Volt and we measure the current using a 0.05 Ohm shunt resistor. Together these produce an output of 1 V per Amp. If your board is drawing 100 mA, you will see an output of 100 mV. The maximum current it can measure is two Amps and we've included a 2 A resettable fuse for added protection.
There are times when you have multiple USB devices in your prototype or device and you just want to plug in one cable. You need a built in USB hub!
The Qwiic USB Hub is a simple breakout board for the USB2514B USB hub IC. What gives it extra flair is the ability to configure the device over I2C. Out of the box, the board will appear as a standard USB 2.0 Hub; no configuration necessary. Closing the I2C jumper will put the device into configuration mode. We've got an Arduino Library to help you set the various parameters of the hub including VID/PID, downstream max current, even language ID and product names.
SparkX releases new products on a randomly occuring basis so we recommend signing up to their newsletter below to remain up to date on all of their goings on. These emails will let you know when new SparkX products, blogs, and more go live. THanks for stopping by to try our our newest, experimental products!
