We're rolling out another Thursday New Product Post!

This post marks 8 months since my first weekly product post - and yet every time, I still get excited when I imagine what you all are going to come up with using these new products! This week we have a great batch of new products as well as one of our patented product videos. Enjoy!

I really wish we did have robot parking around here. The funny thing is that it only took us a few minutes to round up those vehicles, and there were still many more in the building. As always, it was a fun video to make, but driving mecanum robots can be a bit tricky at times. Note to self, never work with animals, children, or custom programmed robots...

The year is 2011 and robots should be able to move more freely than just forward and backward. Watson just beat up on two human contestants in Jeopardy, so why can't my robot move sideways? With mecanum wheels, your robot can now move in any direction it wants. By spinning them against themselves, you can create lateral movement in addition to traditional forward and backward movement. Give your next robot the freedom it deserves!

Let me take a moment to tell you about our next switch. This momentary toggle switch provides an 'off' normal state and two 'on' momentary states. It has heavy-duty screw terminals on the back and a threaded shaft for mounting into your next enclosure.

These 5-way selector switches might be familiar to all of you guitar players out there. They can be useful if you only have the space for a toggle switch, but need to able to select between more than just on or off. They have a nice click to each position and have easy solder lugs on the back. Rock on.

You've spent the last few months perfecting your last project. You had a custom enclosure made, slaved over the code, and got it working just the way you want. But the power switch is just some humble 'button'? How pedestrian of you! Make your next project stand out and use our new key switch. Now you can have a slick way to turn it on and off and even control WHO can turn it on and off. These panel-mount switches come with a set of keys and operate just like a on/off SPST toggle switch.

Our thermal printers turned out to be a lot more successful than we thought. Although thermal paper is relatively easy to find, it doesn't always come in the right size. Our thermal paper comes in a smaller roll that fits nicely into the printer. Now you don't have to hunt for a supplier of paper and buy 10 cases of it just to test out your new printer!

I'm amazed it took us this long to sell resistor packs like this. We now carry 330 ohm and 10k ohm resistors in packs of 20. These are the same packs used in a lot of our kits. They come in handy for almost every microcontroller project. A pack of resistors is always a good thing to have on your workbench.

We've been selling multiple types of conductive thread for a little while now, but haven't had any needles until now. Our needle set has large eyes for thicker threads and come in packs of five (three 48mm and two 39mm needles per pack).

The people over at 4D Systems have a new embedded graphics engine for you to play with. The µVGA-II allows you to offload your graphic processing from your microcontroller. All you need is a serial interface for commands and a VGA/SVGA display.

The 9V Wall Wart has been added to our retail product selection. This is the same 9V adapter we've sold for years, but now with more convenient packaging for all of our distributors and retailers.

Olimex's MOD-MP3-X is an update to their MOD-MP3. Now it uses the VS1053 IC and includes some new features. If you're looking to do some prototyping with the VS1053 or just playing around with an MP3 project, check out this board.

So, this ends another Thursday New Product Post. Hopefully we'll see some cool robots using the mecanum wheels soon! Thanks for reading and see you next week for more new products!