New Products For The Weekend!

Get your weekend started right with some cool electronics!

by Emcee Grady May 14, 2010 6:00 am UTC 17

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First and foremost, Make was nice enough to give us some tickets to Maker Faire San Mateo over May 22nd and 23rd. We have ~30 tickets. We will be including one free MF2010 ticket with each shirt, hoodie, or lab jacket shipping out. Enjoy! (Sorry, tickets won't ship with the other swag items like the pint glass, stickers, wrist belt, patch or posters). Only while supplies last. We'll try to update this post as soon as we run out. If you do score some swag and a ticket, please swing by our booth. We'll have soldering workshops and an overload of blinky this year.

First, we have an official SparkFun Lab Coat. Complete that mad scientist look with this full-length white coat emblazoned with the SparkFun "Geek" logo. Perfect for electronic tinkering, working under the hood of your car, or planning world domination in your evil lair (if that's your thing).

Here is the Benchtop Power Board Kit. This kit allows you to use your old (or new) computer power supply to get the correct power for almost any of your embedded electronics projects!

This is a small helical GPS antenna. Designed to be embedded into hand-held devices, the SL1204 from Sarantel now allows us hackers to get nearly omni-directional antennas built into our projects. Nifty.

This is conductive fabric for use in e-textiles - we have both stretchy weave (ooh stretchy!) and plain weave. Plated with tin, this stuff works great with the LilyPad. This fabric makes me envision some kind of awesome superhero outift - kudos to the first person that sews one!

Speaking of superheroes, if embedded electronics had an arch-nemesis, it would be heat. Vanquish heat with this Heat Sink (with fins). These work really well for high-power LEDs and motor drivers and can be attached with thermal tape or epoxy.

Controlling large-scale devices (like say, a TV or a microwave) with a microcontroller can be a scary project. This PowerSwitch Tail makes it easier (and a lot safer). This is designed to allow you to safely control an outlet device without messing with any 120VAC voltage - which is a nice way of avoiding any 911 calls.

We now have 5mW green lasers back in stock. Incredibly bright! Do not mess around with this one.

This little DIP contains a 74HC4052 Serial/Analog Mux/Demux. This allows you to hook up multiple serial devices to one microcontroller. "Mux" means that one pin can connect to any one of four outputs, for example, allowing you to connect a GPS, a radio, a data logger, and a serial LCD at once. This is a very cool chip that is a life saver if you're having issues hooking up all your serial devices!

Next have an updated version of the OpAmp breakout. This version replaces the old OpAmp (linked for nostalgia's sake), which used a large through-hole potentiometer. The new version is outfitted with a more svelte surface mount pot. It is set up as a 2-stage amplifier with a gain of 100.

This Wiring Board, created in collaboration with Hernando Barragan, is an I/O board designed around the open-source development environment called Wiring (built on the Processing/Wiring language). It features 54 I/O lines, 8 analog inputs, 6 PWM outputs, and 5 timers - plus 128K of memory!

Speaking of labratory coats, we now have safety glasses. Making their debut at Maker Faire, these clear lens, safety glasses feature the SparkFun 'Geek' logo, protecting eyes and damaging reputations.

We also have an updated version of the 7-segment Serial Display (in Kelly Green!). The new version has the input and power pins shifted to the top of the display, allowing you to place multiple displays side-by-side, along with a few other new features! Plus, the kelly green looks awesome!

Last we have two through-hole JST right angle connectors - a 2-pin and a 3-pin version. We really like the solid "click" feel these connectors give as well as their high current rating.