Happy new year to all! As we know 2020 was a hard year for many of us. We can hope the new year 2021 will be brighter and joyful.

In December 2020, we had 211 pieces of certified hardware. 198 of those were from Sparkfun – kudos to them.

Sparkfun certified several edge computing development boards such as Appollo 3 Blue, RedBoard Artemis and RedBoard Artemis Nano. The Artemis module is based on the Cortex-M4F with BLE 5.0 running up to 96MHz and with as low power as 6uA per MHz (less than 5mW). Time-to-first-blink is less than five minutes and it received FCC/IC/CE Certification on the world’s first open-source, US manufactured, BLE module. You can find the board schematics and docs corresponding website. SparkFun certified a few SiFive RISC-V based SparkFun RED-V boards, as well as their QWIIC boards including the QWIIC motor driver and SparkX ATECC608A Cryptographic Co-processor.

We also had a number of individual submissions this month. Those included the USonic-Theremin, a portable, rechargeable theremin using ultrasonic transducers for distance sensing. Connect the device to any consumer-grade speaker or directly to your computer to record your sound!

We also have Scada, a data acquisition board designed primarily for use in physics experiments. It is built around an STM32F303 microcontroller and has 3 precision 16-bits inputs, 2 high-speed 12-bits inputs with a PGA (1x/2x/4x/8x/16x). It also has an instrumentation amplifier connected to a 16 bits ADC and two 12-bits DACs with buffers.

It’s the 5th submission from Brazil.

The Climate & Sprinkler Controller by Keith Burzinski is very interesting! It is primarily designed for switching 24-volt AC circuits but it is flexible by design and should be adaptable to other types of electrical workload and it’s based on esp32 with ESPHome support.

The Github page includes the firmware, schematics, and the 3D Printed enclosure model.

These certifications are from December, Christmas time. The Christmas badge by Technology is a PCB Christmas badge with 5 red LEDs that are powered by a CR2032 coin cell battery. This can also be used as an ornament that you can hang on your Christmas tree and so on. It’s the fourth submission from Mauritius.

Finally, the Open Hardware Summit is coming on April 9th 2021! The Summit is the annual conference organized by the Open Source Hardware Association a 501(c)(3) not for profit charity. It is the world’s first comprehensive conference on open hardware; a venue and community in which we discuss and draw attention to the rapidly growing Open Source Hardware movement.

Tickets are available and for sale on Eventbrite. Standard and Backer tickets must be purchased by March 25 to help ensure your goodie bag arrives before the summit and We invite talk proposals from individuals and groups. Submissions are due by Thursday 2021-02-11 at 11 PM EDT.  Apply Here and get more info here.