Meet Sparkfun’s Qwiic Pro Micro with USB Type-C

The saying that “everything old is actually new again” finally became a reality for the Pro Micro board, as the popular Arduino compatible board gets revised with few additional features. The board that has been a favorite for about half a decade now received something of a great refresh, a Qwiic connector at the back and a USB Type-C at the front.

Speaking at the product launch, owner and creator of the Pro Micro board said that it is committed to adding a whole lot of improvement to its products  “…we refuse to leave “good enough” alone – that’s why we’re adding to our line-up of Arduino compatible microcontrollers” says Sparkfun’s Xtopher.

According to them, even though the Qwiic Pro Micro board has the same size and overall functionality as the original Pro Micro board, the newly revised version has some features that the formal models lack.

“…the board is the same size as the original Pro Micro, but we shrunk down some components on the board and added a few more features, like as a reset button, Qwiic connector, USB-C and castellated pads (this makes it really handy for your custom keyboard creators).”

In order words, the Qwiic Pro Micro is just a Pro Micro with full USB functionality and ATMEGA32U4 on board.

The tiny little board runs at 5V/16MHz and cuts complexity by combining 3.3V and 5V operation on a single board. So with the Qwiic Pro Micro, there’s really no need to choose between 3.3V and 5V models. The board also has full compatibility with Arduino IDE and is capable of all the Arduino tricks you can think of.

Features include:

• Nine 10-bit ADC pins
• 5 PWM pins (pulse Width Modulation)
• 12 Digital IOs, hardware serial connections Tx and Rx
• Qwiic connector to add Qwiic enabled I2C devices to projects.
• USB-C connector for programming
• Reset regulator to quickly reset or place the board into the bootloader mode without having to use jumper wires
• AP2112 3.3V regulator
• Castellated pads

Meanwhile, the Qwiic Pro board can go just anywhere; the speed and power of the board make it great for small builds to go into the wild especially if you want to travel with them and packing size is a concern.

The board is available now at Sparkfun webshop for $19.95, slightly above the price of the 3.3V and 5V models that sells for $17.95.

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