Getting Things Started Again - The IcyBlue Era

Following the "Great Part Shortage of 2022," I had shut down Oak Dev Tech because things were getting so expensive to acquire that it didn't make sense to keep going. At least for that time it seemed true. With things improving with the parts availability, we're confident that we can get things going in a better direction this time. 2022 was hard in a lot of aspects, though we are very optimistic moving forward. Nature is healing as they say.

IcyBlue Is Here!

If you've followed us on twitter, you'll know that we've been working on an FPGA feather for some time now and the parts shortage made it so we had to put things down until we could guarantee that production was going to be possible. Enter 2023 and parts are coming back in stock. With this new optimism, Oak Development Technologies is back in business and we're relaunching with IcyBlue FPGA Feather. You might have noticed that our home page is dedicated to it and our current store is down to prepare for launching. 

IcyBlue represents an opportunities to shift our focus and provide more than just boards. We want to make a true impact in open source and educational communities focused on electronics and engineering. With IcyBlue, this is so much more possible. We're committed to developing the ecosystem and supporting additional boards in the future as we push the limits of what is possible in small boards like the feather form factor.

IcyBlue will launch with a small horde of project boards which will make it more visually understandable to learn FPGA concepts. One that we shared was Traffic Wing, a traffic light controller feather wing aimed at making traffic light state machines more visual and aesthetically pleasing. We're planning to launch Traffic Wing and a few others to be announced when the crowdfunding page officially launches.

What to expect moving forward?

We are expecting to bring more products focused on projects and learning, complete with open source examples that are readily available and supported across Arduino, PlatformIO, and CircuitPython. This is part of our broader commitment to make learning easier and build upon the foundations laid by those before us. Our Tindie shop will slowly start to see more products coming in stock like popular boards like Cast-Away, BREAD 2040, prototyping boards that fit BREAD, additional BREAD boards with new controllers, and more. You will be able to track those changes here as well.

I'm looking forward to supporting the community more and growing into a name that can be trusted in this community.

Seth Kerr
CEO/CTO @ Oak Development Technologies