St. Patrick's Day New Product Post

Happy St. Patrick's Day SparkFun followers! Although there's no real relation between St. Patrick and electronics, we're trying our best to tie the two together. 'Green' is the theme for this week's product post. It must be your lucky day because we have a great selection of new products this week and of course another Thursday New Product Post webisode.

Don't worry, Mr. Planty-Pants will be just fine. He's actually just a silk plant (but don't tell Dave that).

This handy little submersible pump can pump up to 350 gallons per hour. It accepts 12 VDC and is as basic as they come. If you're looking for a watering apparatus, pump for a fountain, or some other project that involves moving large amounts of liquid from one place to another, this pump might be worth checking out.

Let's face it, not all of us have green thumbs. I'm really good at watering my plants the first few weeks. After that, I forget about them and they start looking a bit sad. Thankfully, the Botanicalls Kit solves this problem. Once assembled, the Botanicalls allows your plant to send customized tweets regarding its moisture level so you will know if your plant is too wet or too dry.

If you have some water you want to control, you're going to need a valve. This 12V solenoid valve allows you to precisely control your water flow for your next project. This is not a gravity-feed valve, so you will need some pressure to get it to operate properly. A garden hose or something similar should work fine.

Setting up wireless mesh networks can be a confusing task. Thankfully, Rob Faludi wrote the book on how to do it (literally). However, going through the projects in the book is going to require some parts. Conveniently, we put together the BWSN Kit to go along with most of the examples presented in the Building Wireless Sensor Networks book. Get both and you will truly be a master of XBee.

Speaking of XBees, we have almost all of our new Series 2 XBee modules in stock. We now have the 2mW chip and U.FL modules, as well as the 50mW chip, wire, and RPSMA modules in stock. Series 2 is the new version of Series 2.5 (I don't make this stuff up, don't blame me if it's confusing). It's the same hardware, but has a newer firmware which makes it easier to get a mesh network up and running. For anyone still confused about all the various XBee modules, I highly recommend Robert Faludi's book, Building Wireless Sensor Networks and the associated kit above.

We have a new EL inverter this week. This one accepts a 12v input, has a useful switch (on, off, and blink) and can drive a lot more wire than our smaller inverter. We found that it can successfully drive about 10-15 meters of EL wire.

We are all pretty familiar with the PlayStation 2 controller. However, most of you probably didn't know that someone's written an Arduino library for it. That's right, if you've been looking for the perfect input device for your next project, why not grab a Playstation 2 controller and use that? Check the links on the product page for pinout information and the library.

Coin cell batteries are small, lightweight and relatively inexpensive. But we haven't had a great way to use them yet, until now. Once you solder on the coin cell battery holder (this is just a breakout board), you can easily use those coin cell batteries. Pair this up with one of our LiPo chargers and you can charger those coin cell batteries too!

Traditional 9V battery adapters are handy, but what do you do with the battery once you have it connected? This 9V battery holder lovingly cradles your battery and even has mounting holes on the bottom so you can securely fasten it to your enclosure. The other end has a standard (5.5mm) barrel jack connector.

The LilyPad Protoboard is the same board we've been selling with the LilyPad Thread Bobbin, but without the thread. Now you don't have to buy the thread if you just want to use the protoboard. It has the same thickness and color as the other LilyPad products so your wearables won't clash.

The above picture might not look strange to most people, but upon close inspection, you can see that this cable is having a bit of an identity crisis. One end is terminated with a USB mini-B, while the other is terminated with a USB-B connector. Why would anyone want a B to mini-B? We have no idea, we didn't order them. We were going to toss them out, but had the novel idea to use them for their connectors. How many times have you cut up a USB cable only to solder it to a header or directly to a board? We have, many times. So here we have a cable that (when cut) has the potential to yield you two perfectly usable bare-ended USB pigtails. Of course we won't be ordering these again, but why chop up a perfectly good cable when you can use one of these and possibly put each end to good use?

And lastly, we have a revision of the LPY530AL gyro breakout board. This new version revises the high pass filter, hopefully eliminating some of the problems our savvy customers brought to our attention.

Phew, another product post complete. So many new products, so little time. Thanks for reading (and watching) and have a great St. Patrick's Day and we'll be back again next week with more new products.