New Product Friday: Back to Basics
New Products! SmartBasic, Power Resistors, mid-week releases, and more!
Even though Rob is out of town and REALLY sick, we still have your weekly fix of New Products! Nick is here this week, bringing you a funny yet informative look at all of our new stuff. Let's watch!
As always, Nick comes through to bring us another great New Product video. We hope you all enjoyed that, let's talk about what we just saw.
If you are anything like us (which you more than likely are), you find it annoying that you can't connect a second device to the hardware serial port on a USB-less board without compromising the ability to upload code from the Arduino IDE. The FTDI SmartBasic solves this problem! This small board adds a multiplexer to the serial port pins coming from the microcontroller, which allows the application code to switch the serial signals from the USB port to another device.
We have a new Power Resistor Kit! We've packed 25 power resistors of 5 different resistance levels into one box. What's more is that all of these little guys are capable of handling up to 10 Watts of power dissipation. Inside each box you will find 5 power resistors each of 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 Ohm values.
We have them for AA and AAA batteries, now we have these PTH battery clips for your 18650 Lithium Ion Cell. These simple clips get soldered into a PCB for a drop-in PCB-mounted 18650 battery.
Sometimes you just need a basic robot platform to start prototyping your next project. The Magician Chassis is exactly that, especially with its new, up-to-date hardware. The kit consists of two pre-cut pieces of plastic, hardware, motors and wheels. By adding a RedBot Mainboard or an Arduino and a motor driver, you can easily get a robot up and running. This is a great kit for beginners and educational purposes.
The SparkFun Inventor's Kit is used in so many places, which is great. However, as more and more people use each kit, certain parts tend to wear out or get lost. The SparkFun Inventor's Kit Parts Refill Pack is a simple way to replace the most used (and lost) components so you can keep using the SIK over and over. You also may see quite a few parts in this new pack that aren't in your current SIK, don't worry you'll just have to stay tuned for future New Product posts to find out why!
Lastly this week we have the XBee Wireless Retail Kit. Yes, it's finally back! We've updated both the XBee Shield and Explorer to our most recent versions. We know, we know, it's about time we got with the times.
Well, that's it for this week! Thank you, so much, for coming back every Friday to check out all of our new goodies! Rob should be back next week with more new products, so we'll see you then.
The FTDI Smart basic is effing brilliant!
Hope rob isn't in Dallas...!
The Smart Basic could add hours back to your life! Well, save you time and hassle anyway.