Friday Product Post: Ohhh! What Does This Button Do?
The Qwiic Keypad is now in red, and along with it a new Raspberry Pi PoE HAT and a few other additions to our catalog that won't last forever!
Hello everyone! We have quite a few products to get through today, starting with the new SparkFun Qwiic Keypad, which helps you easily incorporate a 12-button actuator into a project. We also have the new Raspberry Pi PoE HAT, and a VR IMU Breakout with lightly bad silk at a reduced cost. To round out the day we have a couple of limited-time essential components, including three Cherry MX keycaps, three trimpots and some multicolored tactile buttons! Let's take a closer look!
You're really pressing our buttons, now!
Keypads are very handy input devices, but who wants to tie up seven GPIO pins, wire a handful of pull-up resistors and write firmware that wastes valuable processing time scanning the keys for inputs? The SparkFun Qwiic Keypad comes fully assembled and makes the development process for adding a 12-button keypad easy. There's no need for voltage translation or to figure out which I2C pin is SDA or SCL, just plug and go! Utilizing our handy Qwiic system, no soldering is required to connect it to the rest of your system. However, we still have broken out 0.1"-spaced pins in case you prefer to use a breadboard.
Make Power over Ethernet a piece of pi!
The Raspberry Pi PoE (Power over Ethernet) HAT is a small accessory board for the Raspberry Pi computer. The PoE HAT allows you to power your Raspberry Pi using Power over Ethernet–enabled networks. Please be aware that for this HAT to work effectively, the network it is connected to needs to have power-sourcing equipment for a 802.3af Power over Ethernet network installed.
Looks can be deceiving!
Look, this board may not look pretty, but it works like a dream. Virtual reality is in, but you shouldn't have to drop hundreds of dollars to gain access to the technology behind it. Luckily, that's where the SparkFun VR IMU Breakout (with bad silk) comes in. At its heart is Bosch’s BNO080, a combination triple-axis accelerometer/gyro/magnetometer SiP, packaged with a 32-bit ARM Cortex M0+. The BNO080 Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) produces accurate rotation vector headings, excellently suited for VR and other heading applications, with a static rotation error of two degrees or less.
The VR IMU is exactly what we’ve been waiting for: All the sensor data is combined and drift-corrected into meaningful, accurate IMU information. It’s perfect for any project that needs to sense orientation or motion. This IMU breakout board has also been equipped with two I2C Qwiic connectors, in order to make interfacing with the tiny, QFN package a bit easier. It’s part of SparkFun’s Qwiic connect system, so you won’t have to do any soldering to figure out how things are oriented. However, we still have broken out 0.1"-spaced pins in case you prefer to use a breadboard.
This board is functionally the same as the VR IMU Breakout - BNO080 (Qwiic), but our PCBs came in with a poor silk job. The labels may be a bit harder to read, but they are functionally the same.
Cherry MX switches are great for building your own keyboards. Whether you are looking to build a full-sized, 108-key keyboard, your own 10-key or just a custom input for your computer, Cherry MX switches give you that satisfying keyboard click. Now we carry keycaps to make your project a little more professional looking. These keycaps come in an Opaque Black, Translucent or Translucent Black, which allows you to add a solid professional finish to your keys. You can still mark these with a permanent marker, sticker or other marking device. While many of the Cherry MX switches have a spot for an LED it will not show through this keycap.
There are lots of trimpots out there. Some are very large, and some are so small they require a screwdriver. Here at SparkFun, we just needed a simple one that worked. These 2K Ohm, 100 Ohm and 100K Ohm trimmable potentiometers have a small knob built right in, and are breadboard friendly to boot! Perfect for your next LCD contrast adjuster, opamp setting or volume level.
This is a simple 4-pack of momentary, multicolor buttons, great for all sorts of projects! This version of multicolor buttons does not have recessed actuators, and instead has red, green, blue and yellow caps to distinguish them from each other. The colored caps are removable and the buttons fit into breadboards.
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 or Facebook. We’d love to see what projects you’ve made!
Would sure like to see a 16-key pad for the QWIIC bus... would be VERY useful for entering data! (12 just aren't enough -- 10 for digits, one for "backspace", one for "field up", one for "field down", one for "enter" ... oops, we're already at 14...)
Unfortunately, as mentioned in the comment thread of the product page, we won't be releasing a 4x4 version; we did consider it for a while. In the thread you will find a link to the firmware, should you wish to adapt/create your own board for that purpose.