I worked at SparkFun during the summer after freshman year, where I got to design a few new products! I was working under SparkX, which is the companyâs experimental products division that works right under the founder, Nathan Seidle.
SparkFunâs business model is built on breakout boards and libraries, which caters to folks like educators and hobbyists that expect products to work right out of the box. This requires an enormous QA effort, which is great for established products, but can stifle developing new ones that may or may not yet have a market. SparkX products let the company release a preliminary product to figure out how much itâd sell, without burning a ton of engineering time. If they sell well, then theyâll get revised and enter the companyâs main product line. We called this âgoing to redsâ since SparkFun PCBs are red, but SparkX PCBs are matte black.
I created three new products for SparkX that summer:
- The Qwiic Arcade, which solders to the side of an arcade button, and reads the value out over I2C. These have an ATTiny84 that handles the I2C, but theyâve also got a FIFO so a connected device can poll it asynchronously. Unfortunately, this one didnât âgo to redâ, so once we ran out of stock we retired the product. But the product page is still on SparkFunâs site. I designed and assembled the PCBs (by handâŚit was a long summer) and wrote the firmware that ran on the buttons along with the Arduino library users would download.
- The Qwiic Button, which does basically the same thing as the Qwiic Arcade, but just with a tactile button. These did end up going to reds! You can now buy them with either a red or green switch, or even with no switch at all.
- The Qwiic Thermocouple Amplifier, which uses a MCP9600 to read the value of a K-type thermocouple out over I2C. This also went to reds, and now you can buy it with either a PCC connector or with screw terminals. I also wrote the Arduino library for this board.
