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SparkFun will be closed on Tuesday, November 5th to support our team in being able to go out and vote! Orders placed after 2 pm MT Monday, November 4th will ship on Wednesday, November 6th. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
Happy tax day everyone! Yes, it's April 15th, and if you have a refund coming, perhaps purchasing some new toys from SparkFun is a good plan! AVC 2011 is just one week from tomorrow and it's going to be great. It's going to be a LOT bigger than it's ever been before. Be prepared! On that note, I would like to mention that the prices on all of our old AVC t-shirts have been slashed. Get them while they last!
After watching that video, I can't help but think if this is the week we officially jumped the shark. I really hope not. It's not easy coming up with something every week. We don't have a lot of new products for this week, but as you can (or can't) see from the action-packed video above, we do have a few cool ones.
The Digi ConnectPort X2 is a simple little device that lets you connect your XBee mesh network to your ethernet network. There really isn't much more to it than that!
I'm a mechanical guy. As much as I enjoy messing around with electronics, I really like building physical structures and mechanisms. MakerBeam is a dream come true for a guy like me. Its multiple sizes of extruded aluminum beams connect together with the included hardware to allow you to easily build just about anything you can come up with. With MakerBeam, you can easily prototype all sorts of various physical projects and take it apart when you're done. If you just love to tinker, you're going to love MakerBeam.
Laser and 3D printers are becoming quite popular. A lot of people are building machines that only a few people even had access to several years ago. The Quadstepper can control up to 4 stepper motors, making it perfect for many motion-control applications (like small CNC machines, laser/vinyl cutters, or 3D printers).
We have a new version of our RFID USB Reader. This new revision uses SMD headers for the RFID module and now has a solder jumper so you can enable or disable the buzzer. I've used these a couple of times in different projects and they really make using our RFID modules quite easy.
You might want to take a seat before we announce this next product. Yes! We have 4-40 screws back in stock! We are now carrying them in 10 packs, instead of packs of 4. We figure you can't have too many screws on hand, especially when the 4-40, 1/4" size is so common.
There you have it, another Friday New Product Post. Have a great weekend and we'll see you again next week with another product post and next weekend with AVC 2011! Thanks for reading.
OMG, They killed Dave! You bastards.
FWIW, tax day is the 18th in 2011.
That was my first thought as well. I recently learned about Washington D.C.'s holiday on April 16th, Emancipation Day, which is celebrated the preceding Friday when the 16th is on Saturday. Funny thing is that it happened in 2007 also, and I didn't even notice it. (maybe because I efile the 2nd week in Feb and forget about taxes for a year)
Wow, I had no idea. I am the son of an accountant. I knew April 15th before I knew what Christmas was.
Believe me, I knew. I'm still in the middle of e-filing. yikes
Cool, I'm not the only accountant on here...
Shouldn't you be, you know, working? ;-)
bold words from the man who barely survived our last rubber band encounter!
good call!
Your videos are so dang funny!!!! Keep up the good work.
Wow, after all that argueing I looked into Tau, and was rather dissapointed to find that it is just 2pi.
In a mathematical sense, ok it sounds good, a circle that is 2pi Radians just ends up being 1 Tau radians.
Which brings me to my point, when was the last time you pulled out you protractor and measured or drew an angle in anything other than degrees. Mathematically nice, yet impractical.
If you guys could get linear bearings for the maker beam the way you can for 80/20, I'd totally invest right this minute!
When the timer reaches zero, it shorts the battery leads.
Random here:
Did anybody else see Cee-Lo Green's massive, awesome RGB display set on SNL last night. That was crazy!! Makes me want to buy some graphic equalizer chips (as if I didn't already).
No obvious shark jumping here, imo anyway. One of the better recent FNPP posts. Keep up the good work.
I just ordered some makerbeam and was wondering if you guys share how you built the trigger mechanisms for the rubber band guns. I cant quite tell from the video.
Thanks and keep up the great work.
It was just a servo, and arduino pro mini, and one of our game pad triggers. if we DIDN'T work at sparkfun, we would have done it mechanically, without the electronics, which are overkill.
you could build it a bit differently, and use rubber bands to launch servos. That would hurt more.
+1
Thanks,
If you have electronics around why not use them.
Shipping is so steep for the cool stuff... It would cost me $50 to get the beams shipped to APO and $45 for the rover 5 base. How about free military shipping? ;)
ouch. the whole kit is relatively heavy, so it makes sense...
Who else yelled "OH MY GOD!!" at the screen when the MakerBeam came up?
I did! I love 80/20 and other extruded aluminum products! It's like industrial tinker toys!
Hmmm... Does that mean there is ongoing dialogue internal to Sparkfun that suggests this month could be the beginning of the end of Sparkfun?
Or that Sparkfun has simply entered into a point of obscurity, and it will never be the same?
It could mean that you only got seven more years of Happy Days!
About jumping the shark, I'm sure that Robert is referring to the FPPV (Friday Product Post Videos) specifically, and not a statement of all of SparkFun (which shall live on for centuries to come. I mean, it seems like the perfect place for all of your post-apocalyptic needs!).
But, yeah, definitely nearing shark infested waters with this one. Still, as long as the products keep coming out, you'll always have good material!
You'll see me again next wee? I always knew you guys were up to something seedy....