Solder Class and New Projects and Products
New ST micro LPR530AL dual axis gyro breakout boards, and ADXL345 evaluation board with Arduino/FAT32 combo, soldering class on Sept. 30th, smart card socket, and a powerful new GS407 GPS receiver module.
Congrats to Alexander Kern and his team C-PALB from CJD Christophorusschule K?nigswinter in Germany! Their team completed the final rounds in RoboCup this summer with an impressive 7-2 overall record! I had heard of Robocup but never really looked into it. After a little research, I'm pretty excited to learn more. Basically it's high school aged kids building autonomous robots (usually two robots on a team, four robots on a table) that play soccer against one another. Congrats to C-PALB and their team! Have fun building and improving this summer! We hope to hear more next year.
Say it with me: Yes, you really can solder that.
We've got an SMD soldering class
on Sept 30th. This is one of our most popular classes. Come with
nothing, leave with the skills to solder SMD components, and a good
blinky to boot!
We've posted the breakout boards for the new dual-axis gyros from ST. These boards are the first on the planet to offer a 3.3V gyro with two axis in one chip, and offer a type that has pitch and yaw in one package. This means that we can now create, with two dual axis ICs, a three degree of freedom gyro that is flat! We're moving as fast as we can...
Here's a breakdown of the sensor types we carry:
Pitch/Roll:
Pitch/Yaw:
We added so many new gyros that we decided to do some restructuring of the categories. You will now see 1-axis, 2-axis, and 3-axis sub-categories under the Accelerometer and Gyro sensor categories. We hope this helps! Remember also that you can click on the 'Accelerometer' category link and you'll get the entire contents (all 1, 2, 3 axis) of that category - making comparison shopping a bit easier.
Here's a breakdown of the sensor types we carry:
Pitch/Roll:
Pitch/Yaw:
We added so many new gyros that we decided to do some restructuring of the categories. You will now see 1-axis, 2-axis, and 3-axis sub-categories under the Accelerometer and Gyro sensor categories. We hope this helps! Remember also that you can click on the 'Accelerometer' category link and you'll get the entire contents (all 1, 2, 3 axis) of that category - making comparison shopping a bit easier.
MP3 Trigger is a product that we created because in many project cases, we just need to play an MP3. I want to read a sensor or button, and then fire off a signal to something that plays the right sound (think Halloween effects). No initialization necessary. No setting up SPI buses or dealing with FAT file system. Just play the song. That's what MP3 Trigger does best. Pull one of the trigger pins low and TRACK002.MP3 will start playing. There's also a serial API so you can control things like volume and track replay.
This is a fun evaluation board for the ADXL345. The ADXL345 is interesting because of its ability to detect tap and double-tap conditions. This feature is built onto many new accelerometers coming out but we especially like the ADXL345 for its easy of use and packed feature set. We designed this small eval board so that you too can play with three axis accelerometers and data logging. Did we mention we shoe-horned FAT32 onto an ATmega328? Ya, it fits.
The original GS406 GPS module has been updated with Sarantel's new, higher sensitivity SL1206 helical antenna. Combined with a u-Blox 5H chipset, the GS407 is a very impressive GPS module.
Smart card socket now available. The 'smart card' technology is the same stuff that is built into a SIM card. But back before there were SIM cards, some countries (mostly Europe) were embedding ICs into credit cards for identification. Enable your next project to read smart cards! Breakout boards are inbound.
Robocup Junior is a cool contest for high school students, this version was started in melbourne in 99. started using lego mindstorm then the nxt, now many teams in Australia use a combo of lego and pics, atmega, picaxe etc. There are 3 competitions, dance, rescue and soccer (football).
www.robocupjunior.org.au is the Australian website.
Our school uses many sparkfun products combined with picaxe micro in the rescue and dance comps.
Hi,
The robot on the left on Robocup website, is Nao.
It's a french robot replacing Aibo for the football challenge, made by Aldebaran Robotics ... I missed an opportunity to work for Aldebaran some months ago :(
In France (and Europe, but mainly in France), there is also the Eurobot Robotic Cup, which is very interesting (and where Sparkfun is very famous ;-) ).
Best regards,
Thomas Legrand
I wish we could take those classes in Brazil..
For those of us using "spec by guesstimation":
????30?/s = 5 rpm
??300?/s = 50 rpm
1500?/s = 250 rpm
Done. Not using safari though
It helps when we close HTML comment tags. =)
That page should look normal now.
It may just be me but the mp3 trigger product page seems messed up
Looks ok to me... Shoot a screen shot to IT at sparkfun. Let us know what browser you are using. Might be a Safari issue that we saw a few days ago. Either way, thanks for letting us know.