works as expected for an Arduino board, and the QWIIC connection makes setting up an I2C bus easy - no more messing with wires and pullups.

None of the problems mentioned by Member #299089, mine worked great out of the box.

Having discovered the Redboard Qwiic uses the CH340 USB interface I set about installing the CH340 Device Driver on a Dell XPS8930 (as I had done earlier for the FTDI Device Drivers) No Luck! Following the SFE Tutorial and various posts online and YouTube, I was stumped.

After much time invested, I took a closer look at the RedBoard Qwiic hardware.

Not all of the USB-A to USB Micro B cables work, the three I had tried earlier are all "Bad" (even though they work on other USB hardware)

The CH340 seems very fussy about cable length (compared with the FTDI version) Even moving a "good cable" from one example of RedBoard Qwiic to a second one causes the second one to fail to connect. The most reliable cable is not the shortest that I have (1m) but the longest on hand (7m)

On the RedBoard schematic I don't see any build-out resistors between the USB connector and the CH430 IC, but there are 27R resistors and 47p capacitors on the earlier RedBoard version (using FTDI IC)

SFE Engineering was this intentional?

What can I say about a near perfect arduino board. The support is great, I like the 3.3V regulator which give plenty power for attached devices. If you ask me to be picky: Maybe put a jumper to disconnect the D13 LED?

Massive problems out of the box. Not immediately recognized by Windows, and had to peruse the little traveled inter-spaces just to find out the solution was to download a driver called CH31SER.zip. That took most of my day to find because tech support is not available on the weekend... which is when I received my product (which took 20 days to get to me... not exaggerating). So, minus one star for not being ready to use out of the box, and having a very obscure fix.

Works just like an Arduino once you get it working, so big plus! Here's a star for that.

Qwiic seems to function properly, if you can get the libraries to work the first time. Had some trouble with that, but good thing I'm persistent. Minus a star for inconsistent library function.

I really like the lack of through-pins on the back side. Makes it easy to mount and prototype. It seems faster than the normal Arduino, too, but that could just be my imagination. Tried several standard sketches and some very Arduino specific ones, and it works like a champ. Two stars for compatibility and design!

Overall, I still recommend, but beware if you get one like mine. The driver issues I had were solved, once I found a solution, however it was not a widely recognized solution. Also, the driver problem was due to a serial chip not manufactured in the US, and therefore not part of the normal driver update. This should have been either pre-loaded, or part of the tutorial. Sad face.

I am still happy with the product, but unhappy with my lost day trying to find a solution. Also, not completely happy about the Qwiic problems I have had. Especially, because I bought it for Qwiic connections.

If you are interested in a superior Arduino-type product, then this is definitely what you are looking for, but be aware of potential problems out of the box. If you have said problems, then then be ready to burn some midnight oil fixing them.

Would still buy it again, even knowing all of this.

I love this board for having everything a generic beginner project may need, specially the QWIIC functionality.

But the I/O jumper is not easy to solder for newbies and I already burned the pads trying to do so. Maybe an actual jumper would be worth the cost? I have ordered 2 more so I can try to do it correctly this time!

I bought two of them. One of them went belly up, and I didn't to anything untoward to it either. Even the Atmel ICE pod does not recognize the MCU anymore. Don't know what happened there.

But the big problem however is the cheap CH340 USB interface on this board. It does not report a serial number and this causes big headaches with Windows. Plug it into a new USB port and there's differen COM port number. Plug two of them in at the same time and you cannot easily tell which is which.

I mostly wanted a 3.3V Uno running at 16MHz so that part is fine. However, the CH340 is enough of a headache that I won't be buying any more of these.

The product works well and does what it should.

On Big Sur and Monterey, the drivers are not required. Moreover, it takes a bit of searching to find that you cannot execute Board Info from the IDE and you get an error which seems like the kernel drivers aren't installed. On Big Sur/Monterey, the kernel driver for the USB is not required.

Also, the board is recognized as an Uno. It took a bit of searching to find this.

The reason for selecting the RedBoard is simple: it provides a USB-micro connector unlike the ordinary UNO with it's bulky version. I learned the hard way, that the space of a device extends at least 1" on the sides on which there is a connector.

The device run out of the box and i had no problem to load software using the Arduino IDE 1.8.16. What gave me some hard time is to design a support piece on which I could mount the hardware. I had to measure the positions of the mounting holes with paper, pencil, and a ruler!. It's one thing to provide the board size and mounting hole locations in a EAGLE or DXF file but it's completely different thing to provide the same information as a technical drawing in a PDF file, which can be read and used without any costly 3rd party software. All this fancy design software like EAGLE or Autodesk programs are able to produce such a PDF file, so why is it missing? Make a guess!

An other information missing is that the board doesn't provide much meaningful data when using the 'Get Board Info' in the Arduino IDE. Just a few cryptic and therefore meaningless hex numbers doesn't cut it, I expect at least something informing me that the device is Arduino UNO compatible.

It's a good device but it has room for improvement.

Qwiic connector

Interfacing with all the Sparkfun Qwiic boards is painless. The available I/O and enhanced power supply make it easy to launch into a project.

Great board with enough functionality to do many cool, beginner projects with my son. Tutorials/materials online were super helpful to get set up initially and now we can start to branch out with its flexibility.

Getting the RedBoard Qwiic was my first foray into microcontrollers. I'm an intermediate programmer but never really learned C, so the combination was intimidating. My goal is to put together a controller for the real project: an attached greenhouse. While I'm about to move from block work to stone work and then to moving dirt, on rainy days I have been able to connect temperature sensors (via I2C and 1-wire) and a display. Soon I'll connect a PWM duct fan and control speed based on temperatures. The code libraries and examples are awesome. I just wish there were about double the memory space. Nice work SparkFun!

The SparkFun RedBoard Qwiic can't connect to the IDE running under Lnux on "Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS"

The product can work within one hour as the instructions are very clear!

The convivence of the QWIIC is well worth having a Red board instead of a Blue one.

I love this board. It has great build quality, works great every time, good price, and has QWIIC option - perfect! I usually buy 10 at a time on Sparkfun website or DigiKey and today I'm buying 10 more.

I had to assemble a system to take physical input and output a result on a very tight deadline. I decided to measure the input by weight, using this and the QWIIC Scale board. Between the two of these and the libraries provided for using them, I had a working prototype in only a few hours of work. These two products were perfectly matched to my application.

I work on linux and have the ch340 driver. Uploads typically fail unless I hold the board in reset manually and release it at random intervals while it retryies 10 times. When I magically hit an unknown window the upload works. I learned this trick via a google search so it happens to others as well. Seems solvable.