Support the NRFICE project on CrowdSupply

With your support, which means subscribing for email updates, the NRFICE project will go forward on CrowdSupply.com, and become an available product for developers to purchase. With the NRFICE base board in production, we will be able to offer working versions of our products that use NRFICE as the base platform. The MidiBass guitar to MIDI processor is the first project on the list to be built as an add-on to the NRFICE platform.

Click here to go to CrowdSupply and enter your email address. THANK YOU!

NRFICE allows for rapid prototyping of mobile peripheral and edge computing devices. With fewer wires and no programming dongles, many things are possible. Educators can provide experimentation hardware to students with minimal bring-up. Our community can easily develop new sample projects. Once underway, any of the complete sample builds can be chosen in a list on the mobile app and immediately programmed into the board with a phone, no other wires/dongles needed.

A Powerful Combination of nRF5340 and ICE40UP5K

We believe the combination of the nRF5340 and ICE40UP5K is the best chip set for development of edge computing applications. The ICE40UP5K already has examples from Lattice that interface to image sensors and implement AI models for gesture detection, and there are many more existing open source projects for the ICE40 family that perform cutting edge tasks.

In using both, developers and students are getting real world development experience on an FPGA family that is also cost effective in volume production environments. This is in contrast to a lot of DIY projects using Arduino, and others, where the skills learned are not easily carried into industry where cost, size, and manufacturability are serious issues.

Now, importantly, you’ve got your ICE40 for edge computing/AI tasks, but how does it communicate with the outside world? There’s always an MCU to work the marionette strings. We think the nRF5340 is the best choice for development. Nordic semi, as well as module makers like Fanstel, have a rich list of parts at various performance and price points, so when you’ve got your design proven on NRFICE, you can then choose the most cost effective alternative.