The Argos boards are a fantastic idea and Sparkfun did an amazing job making an easy to use interface. I have a few concerns I was hoping someone could help me with. Does Sparkfun post the firmware and/or gerbers for the boards or (ideally) sell the Arctic chipset separately?
First, despite the small footprint of the smol board, when every mm and tenth of a gram count, such as applications for birds…The board could be smaller and lighter without connectors, etc. Without the ability to buy the chip, applications are limited or at least not as good as they could be.
Second, my larger worry is that I invest a lot of time into it and then it’s no longer supported after a couple years and I cannot easily pivout to something else. Is the goal of this product to make a development platform or for users to always have to come back and buy the boards? As small as the smol boards are, it would be more beneficial to me if I could buy the chips from Sparkfun directly and put them on my own boards. This would also to help reduce the size, weight and cost when building many systems. If I can buy a few hundred chips at a time I know even if there are supply chain issues or support stops, I can continue building systems.
Also, I’m curious when the Argos board were released. If they’ve been out for a while then I missed the release.
Regarding the release date, I can see that all documents and comments are around 2 years old. Perhaps, it was released at the beginning or middle of 2021.
Thanks for your interest in our boards and designs. The PCB designs, Arduino Library and code examples are all fully open source. Please follow the links in the Hook-up guides for more details. Our design is based heavily on the open source design kindly published by the Arribada Initiative.
If you are going to be developing your own tag, you will need to buy the ARTIC chips direct from Kineis or Woods Hole Group. You can request Platform IDs for them at the same time. The Platform IDs need to be stored in non-volatile memory not easily accessible by standard users - a Kineis requirement.
Please be aware that your tag will need to be approved by Kineis, even if it is a rework of our or Arribada’s design. The approval process was free when we had our boards approved, but it does take some weeks to complete.
Kineis do also have a software package which runs on the STM32WL and which generates correctly modulated ARGOS data. Add a power amplifier and you should be good to go: