Building Bridges, Emerging Technology
09. December 2022
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Würth Elektronik has wings!

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FeatherWing

Würth Elektronik offers a range of FeatherWing development boards. They are open source and fully compatible with Adafruit's stacked board form factor. These boards bring wireless modules, sensors and power modules into the Feather ecosystem. Because we wanted to know how they would be received, we started a road test for our FeatherWings kit with the US community of distributor element14 late last year. To start, the feedback was very good.

Here are three reviews:

  • The first participant used our sensor FeatherWing and Calypso WiFi FeatherWing together with the Adafruit M0 Feather. Forum member "fmilburn" tested the temperature , humidity, pressure and acceleration sensors. You can see the video here. He was able to confirm that they met the datasheet specifications. Since a new air conditioner had just been installed at his house, he had used the development boards to build a weather station. This involved using the Calypso WiFi module and sensor board on an Adafruit Feather M0 to develop an IoT monitoring device that would be read by an AdafruitIO cloud dashboard. To do this, he modified an MQTT sample provided for the Calypso to send CSV values for temperature, pressure, and humidity to the dashboard every five minutes using the AdafruitIO API definition. The output from the small IoT device was exactly what was displayed on the air conditioning control panel. The full road test report can be found here.
  • Tester Doug Wong used the FeatherWing sensor to construct an altimeter. The plan was to use a TFT FeatherWing to read the values directly from the device, for which Wong had created a case in a 3D printer. When mapping the pins of all the modules, it turned out that there were slight inconsistencies between the display and the sensor board when accessing the sensors via SPI. However, because the element14 community member was using I2C, this conflict was avoided - a removable jumper on the FeatherWing sensor made this easier. In this video, Doug introduces his altimeter and is impressed that it can measure altitude differences as small as three inches based on atmospheric pressure. He uses the accelerometer data to derive the angle at which the device is held. Here's his report on the element14 forum.
  • In the third application example, the sensor board and the Calypso WiFi board were used to build a moisture meter. The tester wanted to use it to determine the moisture in sealed component bags - which, as it turned out, actually contained moist air from the factory. The test description by user "station240" goes into detail about software issues and gave us some good hints for further improvement of the libraries.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank our road testers. The reports were fun to read and show once again how fast and easy it is to develop prototypes with FeatherWings and get them running.

 

Update: Featured in adafruit's "EYE on NPI" video blog

We are especially pleased and honored that adafruit founder Limor "Ladyada" Fried herself introduced and positively reviewed our FeatherWings. In this nine-minute video, she discusses all four boards and acknowledges, among other things, that the MagI³C Power FeatherWing is the first 5 V and 3.3 V power supply for Feather, allowing you to build prototypes for industrial applications with a 24 V power supply. Thank you Ladyada!

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