snickerdoodle is the ultimate embodiment of the old adage: “The best product is the one you would use.” Forged from the intimate, hard-earned knowledge of what it takes to develop, integrate, test, and commercialize complex electromechanical systems, snickerdoodle was the culmination of experiences—both positive and negative—working with tools that, for one reason or another, always seemed to lack the complete package.

Over the course of years in the lab and in the field, it became painfully obvious that there was a pressing need for a professional-caliber, highly capable, affordable, and easy-to-use platform for building mechatronic, high-bandwidth, cutting-edge products that would be competitive in an inherently connected world. And thus, the idea for snickerdoodle was born.

snickerdoodle was designed to make high-performance, power-efficient compute at the network “edge” practical, affordable, and scalable. The envisioned use case is one in which traditional compute architectures (e.g. microcontrollers, microprocessors, GPUs) can’t meet the performance, power, interface, size, or other requirements for a given application; offloading everything to “the cloud” isn’t practical due to latency, data volumes, transmission costs, security, safety, and other concerns; and product volumes fall short of justifying a custom chip design and roll out.

snickerdoodle provides developers with a way to accelerate computationally intensive algorithms in hardware—often by 5X to 50X+ over conventional microprocessors and GPUs—making it easy to work within a much smaller power and size envelope than normally possible. And with its flexibility (by way of the hardware’s software configurability), the range of applications is exceptionally broad. Some examples include: industrial robotics controllers, video encoding devices, far-field audio systems, security and surveillance equipment, wireless networks and gateways, data monitoring and collection, embedded vision products, autonomous vehicles, medical devices, drones…the list goes on.

The journey to bring snickerdoodle to market was not an easy one. Originally launched as part of a crowdfunding campaign in late 2015, the small-but-determined team responsible for snickerdoodle struggled with everything from massive supply chain delays to deep, esoteric technical challenges. Determined not to ship product that did not meet the highest of design and quality standards, delivery dates slipped and previously released products were consolidated to simplify manufacturing and long-term product support. But the team forged ahead.

Now with dozens of commercial products, school curriculums, and side projects running on snickerdoodle, the ever-growing platform and developer community is well positioned to power the next wave of truly brilliant ideas.

We look forward to welcoming you to the snickerdoodle community with open arms. And we can’t wait to see what you create.