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SparkFun will be closed on Tuesday, November 5th to support our team in being able to go out and vote! Orders placed after 2 pm MT Monday, November 4th will ship on Wednesday, November 6th. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
Another week has passed so it's time to talk about new products. We've got a few things this week and a couple of demos. Check out the video to see some products in action.
Vimeo version can be found here.
The Processing sketch that works with the pulse sensor is surprisingly accurate. We were very impressed to see such a usable and inexpensive pulse sensor.
Need to measure you pulse? With the pulse sensor you can easily use your Arduino (or other microcontroller) to do exactly that! Just put it on your fingertip or ear lobe and start measuring. There's even a handy Processing sketch (as seen in the video above) for more visual stimulation.
We've had the Rover 5 Robot Platform for some time. It first appeared in one of the earlier New Product Post videos and we've had fun using it for demos ever since. However, we haven't had a great motor driver for it up until now. The Rover 5 Motor Driver is made specifically for the Rover 5 and has 4 channels for driving each of the motors individually. Also, the encoder inputs on the driver board mix each pair of encoder inputs using an XOR gate making it possible to read both inputs from a quadrature encoder using only one interrupt pin.
The ATSHA204 is the authentication chip that comes on all of our Electric Imp boards. We now have it in a tiny breakout board that provides you with a unique 72-bit serial number. With each chip having its own unique ID, you can use this for a host of applications where you need to identify or differentiate between boards.
And lastly, we have a new revision of a popular XBee module. The 1mW Series 1 XBee gets a new embedded trace antenna instead of a chip antenna. Other than that, it's the same XBee module we've all know and love.
That's all I have for this week. As always, we'll be back again next week with more new stuff for you to tinker with! Thanks for reading and watching. See you next week.
Sorry, but the beard is just getting too exceptional. http://sweetbeard.com/blog/new-product-sparkbeard
Robert, when you demoed the heart monitor, that heart rate did seem to be a bit high.
Are you sure it wasn't hooked up to that badger on your face. :-)
talking about products just gets me all hot and bothered...
haha, really? someone made a youtube video of my beard growth. well, THAT happened.
Yeah that beard is quite majestic.
thank you. it made for a really good lumberjack zombie costume.
pardon the language but a little relevant
A challenge for next week: Do one episode without mentioning "Arduino".
Like it or not, Arduino is a large part of what we do here, mostly because so many people have them and buy them.
What is an "ear lob"?
an antiquated way of spelling lobe.
Ever Time I see products about Robotics I want to share something I discovered, anything you want to make with the "Polymorph" plastic can be more easily done by putting aluminium foil over any shape you can use as a mold, you can improvise ANYTHING, as a mold by using the foil to keep is from sticking. I recently made by own battery case to run my picaxe project from a Motorola razr battery by wrapping the battery in foil and shaping the polymorph around it.
Where's the electronic vaporizers on this site? Juuuust kidding..
Robert could you please check the sound on your Youtube Version? It was really too soft this time around. -WAG BlackLab1
This is my fault. I was using some new equipment. I will make sure to crank it up next time!
Is it really impossible to put enough white space to allow knowing which description belongs to which product picture ?? Its annoying having to read text to see if it is about the pic above or below it.
It's always the text below that refers to the picture above. Excluding comments that pertain to the video, of course, since those might mention multiple products. Was that so hard?
I think it would be worth adding the extra whitespace just so people will stop complaining.
Some people might complain of the extra scrolling needed (particularly on mobile devices) if whitespace is added. Light horizontal line maybe?
Yeah, that would be even better.
that's never a good reason to do anything.
and this is the second time I've seen this comment, and I've written a couple hundred of these posts. I'll keep it in mind, but for now I'll keep the same format I've always used.
My mistake. I remembered more people complaining about it for some reason.
Edit: If adding extra whitespace somehow benefits some individuals while having no negative effect on the others, then adding extra whitespace for the sake of appeasing those with complaints seems justifiable.
Would you have the same attitude if customers complained about a product. Would you still say "thats not a good reason to improve the product" ?
Let me ask the question another way, what is the reason for NOT improving it ? Can you help me see the harm it might cause ?
Simples: the effort and time that SparkFun will invest in changing the whitespace outweigh the desire to please YOU (and one other person in SparkFun history, as Robert mentioned).
Just 2 of us ? Thats quite an assumption ! You surely dont expect "every" customer to complain before you make the site easy on eyes do you ?
Anyways its your site, keep it as you please. I am not not getting paid to help improve it either so dont run away with idea you are pleasing me.
Who said it was an assumption? http://www.sparkfun.com/news/1003#comment-509d872cce395fd54b000000
"and this is the second time I’ve seen this comment, and I’ve written a couple hundred of these posts."
FYI, I don't work here.
You will know its an assumption when you read my comment properly.
number of comments != people who want the improvement
It is equal in your assumption only. Glad to hear you dont work in SparkFun.
You can assume that any number of people would like various aspects of the site to be changed. But preemptive improvement is a waste of time and money. Spin it however you want, at the end of the day, the whitespace is not getting changed. I'm done here.
Yes it is hard and annoying especially when compared to the effort of adding enough white space between each pair.
Do you currently have plans to stock the Netduino Plus 2 that was announced? I was holding off ordering one to see if you would have them up today. It fulfills my need of immediate gratification when I can buy from you and pick it up same day!
We just heard about them too and we are going to carry them, but it's still a few weeks out. I would give it at least a month or so?
What is the music during the rover 5 demo ?
I think it was "Unnecessarily Epic" from the Generic Music Suite. ;)
More than enough time for someone to add the pulse sensor, a LilyPad, an LED array and a shirt for Valentine's Day. Who will make it happen?
Or this project by Becky Stern. Almost exactly what you're talking about, just a headband instead of a shirt.
You should check out this project. Similar to what you're describing, though it doesn't use the pulse sensor!