SparkFun's Tiny "smôl" Family Grows Larger with Environmental Peripheral, Scale Boards

New sensor boards offer pressure, humidity, temperature, air quality, and light sensing, or support for weight measurement via load cells.

SparkFun has grown its family of modular "smôl" boards with another two diminutive entries in the range: the smôl Environmental Peripheral Board and the smôl Scale.

SparkFun launched the smôl range late last year as a more compact alternative to its RedBoard family of devices. Built into a gumstick form-factor, the smôl boards are designed to stack into a fully-functional but small-footprint — and, as second string to their bow, low-power — build.

Now, those stacks can include two additional sensor boards — one for detecting various features of its surrounding environment, and the other for measuring the weight of things.

The first of the new boards, the smôl Environmental Peripheral Board, offers three integrated sensors along its length: A BME280 for pressure, temperature, and humidity monitoring; an SGP40 air quality sensor for detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs); and a VEML7700 ambient light sensor. All three sensors are individually addressable and exposed to the host board over an I2C bus.

The smôl Scale, by contrast, packs a 24-bit dual-channel NAU7802 analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and programmable gain amplifier at its heart — giving it support for measuring the resistance of a connected load cell and, with some calibration, turning that into a weight measurement.

The company has also teased a board not yet present on its website: The smôl OLED, which as its name suggests adds a widescreen-format organic LED display panel to a smôl stack. Specifications and availability for the board have not yet been disclosed.

The other two boards are now available as part of the smôl range, priced at $39.95 for the Environmental Peripheral Board and $14.95 for the Scale on the SparkFun Store — but, like the rest of the family, form part of the company's experimental SparkX product line, meaning there's no guarantee of continued production.

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