SparkFun Artemis Development Kit with Himax Camera

You can program the kit using multiple methods. For beginners, use the drag-and-drop Mass Storage Device (MSD) mode by copying a compiled binary to the board's drive. For advanced development, use the Arduino IDE with the SparkFun Apollo3 boards package, Arm Mbed OS through Mbed Studio/CLI, or the native AmbiqSDK. The USB-C connection also provides a serial COM port for debugging output and a HID interface for advanced debugging tools.

The Ambiq Apollo3 Blue MCU on the Artemis Module is designed for extreme low power, consuming approximately 6 microamps per Megahertz (µA/MHz) in active mode. This enables operation at less than 5 milliwatts total system power. The module supports deep sleep modes for battery-powered applications, making it suitable for always-on sensor nodes and wearable devices where energy efficiency is critical for long-term deployment.

The kit includes a Himax HM01B0 monochrome (grayscale) camera sensor. It has a QVGA resolution of 320x240 pixels and supports a digital video interface. It's designed for low-power operation and is commonly used for basic machine vision, face detection, object tracking, and other TinyML applications on resource-constrained microcontrollers. The sensor communicates over a dedicated bus to the Artemis Module's GPIOs.

The Artemis Dev Kit exposes both SWD (Serial Wire Debug) and JTAG (Joint Test Action Group) interfaces via labeled through-hole pads (PTH). You can connect a compatible debug probe (like an ST-Link, Segger, or the SparkFun BlackMagic Probe) to these pads to perform live debugging, step-through code execution, and memory inspection. The SWD interface is the more common two-wire standard for Cortex-M cores.