QuickLogic, SparkFun, and Crowd Supply Launch the SparkFun Thing Plus - QuickLogic EOS S3 Development Kit

By Tiera Oliver

Associate Editor

Embedded Computing Design

March 15, 2021

News

QuickLogic, SparkFun, and Crowd Supply Launch the SparkFun Thing Plus - QuickLogic EOS S3 Development Kit

QuickLogic announced that it is co-launching the new SparkFun Thing Plus – QuickLogic EOS S3 development kit, featuring a small form factor board with a QuickLogic EOS S3 SoC with Crowd Supply and SparkFun Electronics.

This new dev kit includes the Qwiic Connect System, enabling users to complement the embedded FPGA and MCU on the EOS S3 SoC with additional development functionality. The kit is also supported by open-source development tools, making it ideally accessible. 

The SparkFun Thing Plus – QuickLogic EOS S3 development kit incorporates the EOS S3 SoC, which includes QuickLogic's embedded FPGA (eFPGA) technology with 2,400 effective logic cells and 64 KB of RAM along with an embedded Arm Cortex-M4F MCU running at up to 80 MHz and providing 512 KB of RAM. The eFPGA technology can implement custom IP, accelerate or offload functions from the MCU, or provide glue logic. The Arm Cortex-M4F can implement functions best suited to software. The hardware and software flexibility makes the kit an ideal development platform for a range of applications, including adding voice or AI/ML processing to edge IoT devices. The combination of embedded FPGA and MCU functionality on the same SoC allows the EOS S3 to consume little power, making it suitable for remote and battery-powered applications.

SparkFun's Thing Plus – QuickLogic EOS S3 form factor and integrated Qwiic Connect System enables developers to add other design building blocks to the Thing Plus - EOS S3 dev kit, including over 150 development boards, sensors, LCDs, relays, and more, without the need for soldering.

Once the boards begin shipping at the end of May, SparkFun will release its standard suite of documentation, including sample code, design files, and tutorials for getting started. The kit is supported by 100% open-source software tools such as FreeRTOS, Zephyr, nMigen, Docker and SymbiFlow, and includes support for AI tools, including the SensiML Analytics Toolkit and TensorFlow Lite. The development kit will be sold and distributed through the online site Crowd Supply.

The SparkFun Thing Plus – QuickLogic EOS S3 development kit has launched exclusively on Crowd Supply.

For more information, visit www.quicklogic.com/products/eos-s3/sparkfun-thing-plus.

Tiera Oliver, Associate Editor for Embedded Computing Design, is responsible for web content edits, product news, and constructing stories. She also assists with newsletter updates as well as contributing and editing content for ECD podcasts and the ECD YouTube channel. Before working at ECD, Tiera graduated from Northern Arizona University where she received her B.S. in journalism and political science and worked as a news reporter for the university’s student led newspaper, The Lumberjack.

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