GPIO Me Oh My
The Qwiic GPIO looks good in red, plenty of Jetson Nano 2GB options, a new Qwiic OLED, Raspberry Pi 4 goes 8GB, and lots of cases!
How's it going, SparkFans? We have a LOT of new products to showcase this week - so many, in fact, that we had to announce four of them on Monday! Two versions of the NVIDIA Jetson Nano 2GB are available, both with and without WiFi adapters. On top of that we also offer new versions of the DLI Kit and JetBot Kit, both with the new 2GB Jetson Nano. Two new Qwiic boards are available as well that offer new GPIO and OLED options. Last up, SparkFun now carries the 8GB version of the Raspberry Pi 4 with three unique cases and a Fan HAT. Let's jump in and take a closer look at our new products!
Unlock all the I/O with Qwiic!
The Sparkfun Qwiic GPIO is an I²C device based around the TCA9534 I/O Expander IC from Texas Instruments. The board adds an additional eight IO pins, which you can read and write just like any other digital pin on your controller. The details of the I²C interface have been taken care of in an Arduino library so you can call functions similar to Arduino's pinMode and digitalWrite, allowing you to focus on your creation!
The SparkFun Qwiic OLED Display can display up to three lines of text and features 128x32 pixels in a small, 0.91-inch (diagonal) frame. As an OLED, this display does not have a back light layer (unlike LCDs) and therefore it’s thinner, consumes less power, and has higher contrast.
Discover the power of AI and robotics with NVIDIA Jetson Nano 2GB Developer Kit. It’s small, powerful, and features a more economical price tag to lower the barrier to entry for you to get started in AI and machine learning. This means educators, students and other enthusiasts can now easily create projects with fast and efficient AI using the entire GPU-accelerated NVIDIA software stack, as well as cloud-based tools. These boards are now available for pre-order.
We have you covered with Jetson Nano 2GB Kits, too! The SparkFun DLI Kit and SparkFun JetBot AI Kit are both now available with the 2GB Jetson Nano with a WiFi adapter. If you are interested in picking either of these kits up, they are now available for pre-order and will ship the same time as the standalone boards.
In the next iteration of the Model B line, Raspberry Pi has given us the very powerful Model B 4 with the goal of becoming a full desktop experience. The 8GB DDR4 RAM version of this board has the ability to run two 4k monitors at once via two micro HDMI ports, and features the long-asked-for, true Gigabit Ethernet. This creates a much higher-performing multimedia experience with the new Pi! In addition to two USB2 ports the Raspberry Pi 4 also has two USB 3 ports, making data transfers that much quicker over USB.
Raspberry Pi is a favorite development board in the maker community, so you will want to make sure you have a way to protect it as well as you can! With the Argon ONE, Argon NEO, and Argon POLY+ you will have three different options to house your favorite Pi.
The Argon40 Fan HAT for the Raspberry Pi Model B boards is a great way to cool your board during more intensive applications. This software-controlled fan comes in a typical HAT configuration and plugs right into the 40-pin I/O header on the Raspberry Pi.
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 or Facebook. We’d love to see what projects you’ve made!
The mind boggles... (I'm surprised that Rob didn't mention this...) daisy-chain eight SparkFun Qwiic GPIO boards onto each "output" channels of eight SparkFun Qwiic Mux Breakout - 8 Channel (TCA9548A) boards themselves daisy-chained together and you get, yikes, 4096 IO pins! (Of course, somewhere in there you're gonna have to supply "external power"...)
Methinks you need to review the page on the SparkFun Qwiic OLED Display (0.91 in, 128x32) as it says "The breakout board also features four mounting holes that can be snapped off" ... I'm only seeing two mounting holes and they really don't look to me like they're meant to be "snapped off". (Also review the "Features" tab as it, too, talks about snap off mounting holes.) I suspect that this is a legacy from the "Previous version"...