SparkFun Launches Experimental SparkX Qwiic GPIO Board to Add Pins to Any Project via I2C

Supporting up to eight boards per I2C bus, the Qwiic GPIO board can add up to 32 easy-latch pins to any project.

Gareth Halfacree
4 years agoHW101

SparkFun has launched an experimental board, under its SparkX family, designed to bring additional general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins to any I2C bus — up to 32 pins per bus.

"Do you find yourself wishing that you had just a few more GPIO pins? What if you only need that one more pin? You could add another microcontroller to your project but that increases cost and complexity," SparkFun writes of the device's inspiration. "Instead, you can use the Qwiic GPIO to add four new pins to your Qwiic project!

"The Qwiic GPIO is an I2C device which adds an additional four 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 for you so you can call functions similar to Arduino's pinMode and digitalWrite, allowing you to focus on your creation!"

A key feature of the Qwiic GPIO board is its use of quick-connect latch terminals, which enables wires to be clamped with the push of a lever. Cuttable traces on the rear of the board allow for a change of I2C address, meaning up to eight boards can be connected to a single bus — adding a total of 32 pins to the project.

As a SparkX board, though, there are one or two caveats: First is that the design has been brought to market rapidly, and while they're tested they don't come with the usual SparkFun guarantee; second is that there's no promise that the board will make its way from experiment to regular stock, meaning that supply could dry up at any time.

At the same time, SparkFun has also unveiled a SparkX 2D barcode scanner board — based on the DYScan DE2120 scan engine — priced at $44.95, with the same caveats as the other boards in the SparkX range.

The Qwiic GPIO is available, at the time of writing, via the SparkFun store for $7.95 per unit.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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