Friday Product Post: Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-SoC
Today we have revised a couple of our favorite boards: The FreeSoC2 and the Haptic Motor Driver. We also have a new antenna to attach to your RockBLOCK!
Hello there, everyone, and sorry for the "Big Bang Theory" pun. Welcome to yet another Friday Product Post here at SparkFun Electronics! Today we have three mighty new products to show off to you, two of which are much-needed revisions to boards that you love: the FreeSoC2 and our very own DRV2605L Haptic Motor Driver. In addition to those two boards, we are releasing an external patch antenna for the RockBLOCK Iridium SatComm modules we currently carry.
We don't have any "new" videos to show off today, but that's only because we loved our previous ones so much we wanted to show them off again. Now let's take a closer look!
Destroy enemy fighters with the power of the FreeSoC2!
This is the FreeSoC2 Development Board, SparkFun’s take on the PSoC5LP ARM Cortex. The PSoC (Programmable System-on-Chip) brings together features of the programmable devices and microcontroller-type systems-on-chips into one package. By placing a programmable fabric between the peripherals and the pins, the FreeSoC2 allows any function to be routed to any pin! Moreover, the onboard PSoC includes a number of programmable blocks, which allow the user to define arbitrary digital and analog circuits for their specific application.
What's hap-hap-hapening?
Ready to add some good vibes to your project? Look no further than the SparkFun Haptic Motor Driver. This board breaks out Texas Instruments' DRV2605L Haptic Motor Driver, which adds meaningful feedback from your devices using the breakout and an Arduino-compatible device and is capable of driving two different types of motors, ERM and LRA.
The RockBLOCK External Patch Antenna is a high-performance magnetic mount antenna designed specifically to communicate efficiently with the Iridium® Satellite Communication system. This antenna utilizes the Taoglas expertise in ceramics by incorporating a ceramic patch tuned specifically for the antenna environment, giving greater stability.
That's it for this week, everyone. Be sure to check back next Friday for a load of brand-new products (no revisions, we promise)! As always, we can't wait to see what you make with these products! Shoot us a tweet @sparkfun, or let us know on Instagram or Facebook. We’d love to see what projects you’ve made!
Thanks for stopping by. We'll see you next week with even more fantastic new products!
What's the difference between the new FreeSOC board and the old one? I didn't see any comparision in the product pages other than "a new version is available."
The changes were mostly cosmetic or to address issues discovered in the field. Bypass capacitors around the regulators were adjusted to add a small ESR, the caps on the RTC crystal footprint were replaced with unpopulated through hole capacitor footprints, an isolated plane around the USB ports was added to enhance durability, and some changes to silk were made. I think that's all of the changes for this version.
Seriously! We need to know. And what changed on the haptic board too, for that matter?
The haptic motor driver had an issue driving LRA motors because of a bad cap placement. The revision simply rerouted a single trace so it worked properly with both ERM and LRA motors.