SparkFun's New Qwiic Micro Family Offers Popular Breakouts in a Significantly Reduced Footprint
Measuring in at less than a quarter the footprint of standard Qwiic breakouts, Qwiic Micro launches with four sensor boards.
SparkFun has announced a new peripheral board family, designed for those who love the convenience of the solder-free Qwiic connector but find the standard breakout boards a little big: Qwiic Micro.
"Qwiic Micro reduces the size of a normal Qwiic board by more than a third, creating a new standard of 0.75×0.30"/24.65×7.62mm," explains SparkFun's Chris McCarty. "Don't worry, we aren't getting rid of our Standard Qwiic board size of 1×1", and our actual Qwiic Connector isn't changing size either - it's just a new board size offering!"
The new Qwiic Micro boards are less than a quarter the footprint of their full-scale predecessors, freeing up valuable room in portable and other size-or-weight-critical projects. The shrinkage does come at a cost, however: The boards drop the second Qwiic connector of their full-size equivalents, along with the unpopulated 2.54mm pin headers — though the latter is compensated for by the presence of unpopulated ground and interrupt pins.
For the launch, SparkFun has announced four initial Qwiic Micro boards: one with a Bosch Sensortech BMP581 absolute pressure sensor with a claimed 1/64Pa accuracy; another with the Bosch Sensortec BMP384, a lower-cost high-resolution pressure sensor with improved resistance to humidity; one with an STMicroelectronics ISM330DHCX six degrees of freedom (6DoF) inertial measurement unit (IMU) for robotics, automation, and navigation projects; and finally a board with the MEMSIC MMC5983MA triple-axis magnetometer.
All four boards are drop-in replacements for existing full-size Qwiic breakouts, providing the project doesn't rely on the presence of the second Qwiic connector or pin headers. Each also includes a single mounting hole in the top of the PCB, just above the ground and interrupt pins.
All four boards are available now, priced at $20.95 for the BMP581, $16.95 for the BMP384, $25.95 for the ISM330DHCX, and $15.95 for the MMC5983MA, all before volume discounts. At the time of writing SparkFun hadn't announced which Qwiic breakouts will get the miniaturization treatment next.
