Hello and welcome to another Friday Product Post here at SparkFun Electronics! This week, we are bringing you five new products for you to check out, and it all starts with a new Thing Plus board that utilizes the Azurewave AW-CU488 and the Realtek RTL8721DM! Following that, we have two new color LCD boards, the RoundyPi and the Roundy Fi. These are unique for our LCD offerings not only due to the fact that the screens are completely round, but that one is controlled by the popular RP2040 IC as well as one that is WiFi-capable! To round out the week, we have two new SparkX boards as well! Now, let's jump in and take a closer look at this week's new products.
The SparkFun AzureWave Thing Plus is a Feather form-factor development board equipped with the AW-CU488. The module features the Realtek RTL8721DM integrated single-chip low-power dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) wireless LAN. It also consists of a dual processor core: Real-M300 CPU (ARMv8-M, Cortex-M33) and Real-M200 CPU (ARMv8-M, Cortex-M23). Connect the SparkFun AzureWave Thing Plus to the cloud to grab current weather conditions in your area, post sensor data to a server, control the lights in your next home automation project, or even calculate the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of an input audio signal!
RoundyPi is a round LCD display based on RP2040 along with a compact and stylish 1.28-inch display module of 240×240 resolution, 65K RGB colors, clear and colorful displaying effect, expanding its engagement with your project. RoundyPi comes with an embedded GC9A01 Driver and SPI Interface that minimize the required IO pins.
Similar to the RoundyPi above, RoundyFi is a 1.28-inch round LCD display based an ESP-12E MCU capable of running at 80 or 160MHz with built-in support for 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. The ESP-12E is particularly praised for its efficiency and ease of use. The screen is a full color display and has two interface options: USB MicroB or the 6 pin through hole vias at the bottom of the screen (male headers included).
The SparkX Swarm MicroMod Function Board is an adapter board which allows you to add Swarm Satellite connectivity to your MicroMod project. It is designed to be plugged into the MicroMod Main Board - Single or MicroMod Main Board - Double. You can then install the Swarm M138 satellite modem and communicate using our dedicated Swarm Satellite Arduino Library. It's a perfect solution, allowing you to create a satellite-enabled MicroMod Tracker or Data Logger using your favourite processor!
You might be wondering why we would make an NFC/RFID tag peripheral board for smôl? The STMicroelectronics ST25FV64KC smôl board is a dynamic Near Frequency Communication / Radio Frequency Identification tag IC with 64Kbit (8KByte) of on-board EEPROM memory. It has an I2C interface which the smôl processor board can use to read and write to the EEPROM memory. But the memory can also be read and written to over the RF link while your smôl ecosystem is in deep sleep! This means it is perfect for: contactless data storage and collection; and for configuration.
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, Facebook or LinkedIn. Please be safe out there, be kind to one another, and we'll see you next week with even more new products!
