SparkFun Electronics Unveils New Point-and-Click Board Design App

Introducing SparkFun À La Carte, a custom electronics board design service

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Oct 28, 2020, 10:07 ET

BOULDER, Colo., Oct. 28, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- SparkFun Electronics is proud to announce the release of SparkFun À La Carte (ALC), a custom electronics board design and manufacturing service that bridges the gap between prototype and production.

ALC provides a simple, point-and-click interface to design and manufacture custom boards. SparkFun À La Carte's smart design ensures all connections have been made and that every board designed using the service is electrically sound. Once designed, SparkFun builds and ships the boards within three to four weeks.

SparkFun À La Carte (ALC) is a custom electronics board design and manufacturing service that bridges the gap between prototype and production. Users create their custom board through a simple point-and-click interface, while smart design ensures all connections have been made and that every board designed using the service is electrically sound. Once designed, SparkFun builds and ships the boards within three to four weeks.

ALC includes an innovative mix of "block" options:

Varied controller options encompassing ESP32^® WROOM, ATmega328P, ATtiny84, SparkFun Artemis and SAMD51
Sensors from u-blox^®, Bosch^®, Microchip Technology^®, Sensirion^®, Texas Instruments^® and more
Joysticks, buttons, switches, trimpots, LEDs, buzzers and motors
Multiple connector options
RFID, Bluetooth, WiFi, LoRa and other transceiver options
Ability to integrate the Qwiic^® ecosystem of sensors, shields, LCDs, relays and accessories

"Not everyone with an idea is a hardware engineer or has access to one to help bring their idea to life," said Nathan Seidle, founder and engineer at SparkFun. "The beauty of ALC is that it does all the hard work for you. All you need to know is what parts you want to use, and our system will design all the traces and place the blocks for you, allowing anyone to create a custom-designed board."

Once a board has been built, users have the option to purchase fully routed design files. With these files unlocked, the design can be tweaked and customized as needed for traditional manufacturing through SparkFun or elsewhere.

"With SparkFun À La Carte, we've taken SparkFun's years of board design and manufacturing knowledge and packaged them into an easy to use platform anyone can leverage to create custom boards," said SparkFun CEO Glenn Samala. "With this offering, we hope to round out our service offerings and streamline our customer's ability to reach proof of concept and bring products to market."

Design a custom board with SparkFun À La Carte at alc.sparkfun.com.

About SparkFun Electronics (www.sparkfun.com)
Since 2003, SparkFun has been helping turn ideas into reality – whether you're creating a smart weather station, exploring the frontier of machine learning, or prototyping your first (or tenth) product. No matter your vision, our open source tools, documentation, and online tutorials make emerging technology easy to use, and the road to a finished project shorter.

SOURCE SparkFun Electronics