New Product Friday: Sense Your Environment

Oh boy, we've got a LOT of new products this week! We've got some long-awaited new revs, customer-requested products, and even some new cool sensors. Check out the video below for a full explanation of the new sensors and a little bit more about the manufacturer, Atlas Scientific.

Vimeo version found here.

It's really cool seeing some guys that had a problem they needed to solve do so by being innovative and coming up with simple solutions. We would like to point out that these are not hobby-grade sensors, but are up to the task of being used in laboratory settings. If you need some stuff that's more accurate than hobby-grade, and don't want to spend the time to make your own custom sensors, these guys have figured it out for you.

First up, we've got a new revision to the Retail SIK (SparkFun Inventor's Kit). The retail version is the one that comes with the fancy plastic box that stores all the components as well as the manual. We've revamped a lot about this kit and it's the best one we've made (so far). The new case does away with the old snaps and now uses hinges and locking tabs. Now you can easily reuse the case without worrying about the tabs breaking off. Additionally, we've added a compartment at the bottom to store the manual. So, lift open the top to reveal all the electronic goodness that is the SIK, flip it over and open the bottom to reveal the manual, or whatever else you want to put in there. We've also revised the manual and all the code to be more consistent and easier to use. All these changes have come from numerous classes and teaching the SIK in various parts around the country. We hope you enjoy the changes. And if you're new to Arduino and want to start learning what it's all about, there's no better time than now to get an SIK.

Now that we have the new cases in, we can start selling them separately for all those who just want to use it for parts storage. As I described above, we've redesigned the case to be more user-friendly and useful over time. The parts storage is largely the same as the last one, but now has an additional compartment in the bottom for a manual, papers, or whatever else. More pictures coming soon!

Moving on to all the new sensors and such from Atlas Scientific. First up we have the small flow meter kit. This kit gives you everything you need to accurately measure flows from 800ml/minute up to 7.5LPM. The kit consists of a flow meter, pre-filter (you don't want to clog your flow sensor, right?) and a little board which accurately translates the data into a basic serial string that can be read by a microcontroller or your computer. The accuracy of the kit is about ± 1mL/min. 

The electrical conductivity kit gives you all you need to measure electrical conductivity of water, therefore telling you the salinity and total dissolved solids. The kit includes a probe, solutions to calibrate your probe, a BNC connector, small breakout for the connector, and a little board that interprets the information and gives you accurate data, instead of just voltage.

Want to measure dissolved oxygen in water? We've got a kit for that now. The DO kit gives you a probe, breakout, connector, and a board that translates the values for you. Additionally, it includes a bottle that lacks any dissolved oxygen, so you can get a baseline reading from the probe to verify accuracy. As with all these kits, the board just spits out values over serial so you can easily log or read them.

And the last sensor we have from Atlas Scientific is the Color Detector Sensor. It's similar to our color light sensor breakouts, but much of the heavy-lifting has been done for you. The whole unit is completely weather sealed for submersion or embedding out in the elements. Also, the unit outputs real world values as 0-255 of R, G, and B. It will easily allow you to measure what color the unit is pointed at, and can also measure the LUX (brightness) of each color as well.

Lastly, we've got a simple data logger. This data logger was born to be embedded. By just using solid state memory, there's no SD card to fail or change out (or lose!) so you can just fully seal it into an enclosure. It's small and when fed plain text, can hold quite a bit of data. If you have an application where you don't want to mess with the variable of an SD card, check out this simple logger.

Next up, we have this 4xAA battery drawer. It holds 4 AA batteries and can be panel-mounted and screwed in place. There's a 'drawer' the slides out for changing the batteries. No more taking your entire project apart just to change out the batteries!

The TransmorgiShield was actually a product that we had on the site a couple weeks ago, but I forgot to talk about it! It's a simple shield, but solves a very real problem. It allows you to use all our old shields with the new Arduino Leonardo. The Leonardo moved the SPI and I2C pins, which made it incompatible with all the old shields. The TransmogriShield is a go-between the corrects this.

When we came out with the TransmorgiShield, people were interested in the SMD headers on it. If you want it, you got it. I said we'd carry these headers and here they are. We've got the male SMD headers in 6-pin, 8-pin, and 10-pin. They use a staggered footprint and are in the SparkFun Eagle Library for easy use.

Additionally, we've got the female versions as well! We've got these in 6-pin and 8-pin to work with your older Arduino boards that have just 6 and 8 pin headers on them. They work the same way with a staggered right-angle footprint, also in the SparkFun Eagle Library.

And lastly, but certainly not least, we have a new breakout for the HIH6130 humidity sensor. The HIH6130 is a digital output-type relative humidity (RH) and temperature sensor combined in the same package. This allows the RH measurement to be temperature compensated and provides a second, standalone temperature sensor output.

Phew! That was a lot of new stuff. Hopefully there's something in the list that's making you feverishly add to your cart. If not, there's always next week. I've got to get working on the huge batch of stuff for next week too! Thanks for watching and reading and we'll be back next week with even more goodies. See you then.