Dual-Port Data Logging
The new SparkFun Dual-Port Logging Shield for Thing Plus is now available along with the new SparkFun LoRaSerial Kit and SMA Magnetic Mount for our Swarm Cellular Board!
Hello, everyone! Welcome back to another Friday Product Post here at SparkFun Electronics! This week we are happy to bring you an assortment of new products including the beta version of our new LoRaSerial Kit. This RF enable LoRa IoT Kit will be a strong accessory for our RTK Surveyor product line. Just make sure to keep an eye on it, because we plan to revise this kit soon and put it in an enclosed case! That being said, our actually headliner today is the new SparkFun Thing Plus Dual-Port Logging Shield! This handy shield is both Thing+ and Feather-compatible and will definitely assist you with most, if not all, of your data logging needs. Also releasing this week, we have an SMA magnetic mount that should be perfect for a Swarm Satellite antenna! Lastly, we have a whole reel of WS2812 LEDs (yes, that's 1,000 LEDs!) that join our addressable LED offering. Without further ado, let's jump in and take a closer look at all of this week's new products!
Collect and read data your way!
The SparkFun Dual-Port Logging Shield is a Thing Plus/Feather-compatible board which allows you to access your microSD card over both SPI and USB-C. It is designed to be mounted on or under one of our Thing Plus boards. You can log data to and read data from your microSD card over SPI as usual, using your favorite Arduino SD library. But you can also connect it to your computer via USB-C and read and write files at up to 35MBytes/second!
The SparkFun LoRaSerial Kit is a pair of serial radio modems that simply passes serial back and forth. Do you have a system that needs to report data every few seconds? Is it located beyond WiFi or Bluetooth® range? Do you need nine mile / 15 kilometer range? LoRaSerial transmits data over LoRa giving it incredible range compared to other methods. We’ve regularly transmitted over 9mi/15km line-of-sight using two LoRaSerial radios, right out of the box.
This product is currently in the beta phase and is discounted accordingly. This version is recommended for users who are willing and able to provide feedback and update the firmware as new features are made available. The radios work but may not be ideal for all applications yet.
When experimenting with GPS or RF, it can be very handy to have the antenna on the top of your house or car with a clear view of the sky while you stay in doors and warm at your keyboard. This 2m (6.5ft) magnetic mount SMA extension does a great job of connecting your receiver or radio to a distant antenna with as little RF loss as possible. While you're stationary, this mount should be perfect for a Swarm Satellite antenna.
The WS2812 may look like a common 5050-sized (5x5mm) SMD LED, but there’s actually an integrated control circuit embedded inside there too. Sometimes you don't need 10 or even 50, maybe you need a whole reel of 1000! If you are the person who needs that many then this is the perfect quantity for you. If you look really hard, you can see the tiny black chip hidden in there, along with minuscule gold wires connecting the chip to the LED. This LED is certainly more than meets the eye!
That's it for this week. As always, we can't wait to see what you make. Shoot us a tweet @sparkfun, or let us know on Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn. Please be safe out there, be kind to one another, and we'll see you next week with even more new products!
