A Plethora of New Products and a New Tutorial

by Nate
November 4, 2008

A Weather Station, some breakout boards, soldering tools, and a few other cool new products. Oh, and a very important tutorial.

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We have created a great tutorial that goes over PCB design and etiquette for manufacturability using PCB fab houses. Spark Fun has literally sent for tens of thousands of boards and we have learned a ton from our PCB fab house. Your PCB manufacturer is not perfect and the fabrication of PCBs is not a trivial task, therefore one must know the limits of these fab houses so that you spend less time creating coasters and more time actually designing your project. Learn from our mistakes and check out this tutorial!

This is a really cool widget that will allow you to check the weather without ever leaving your bed. This build-your-own Weather Station comes with an anemometer with a reed switch, a wind vane with a potentiometer for indicating the wind direction, and a rain gauge with a switch that closes at set increments.

The Arduino Diecilmila has now been replaced by the Arduino Duemilanove (2009 in Italian).

Meter and measure your power consumption like a pro with the ACS712 Low Current Sensor. This little guy is a member of our new group of current sensors. We've added an opamp gain stage for more sensitive current measurements and by playing with the gain, you can get measurements on very small currents.

Small just got smaller. The OS-4000 is the cousin of the OS-5000, but is even tinier ? coming in at only 0.6 inches by 0.6 inches. This module contains a high-resolution, three-axis, tilt-compensated digital compass and an easy to use ASCII interface.

One of our infrared sensors, the Sharp GP2Y0A02YK0F Long-Range infrared sensor can detect objects from up to 5 feet way.

Just some simple transistors from ST Micro. The BC547 BJT NPN transistor works great in audio applications.

This is a Lantronix XPort embedded device server breakout board. This nifty board takes the signals and puts them into a format that is relatively easy for prototyping on breadboards or perfboards. Very handy.

A simple breakout board for the MQ-3 Gas Sensor. It'll help you get crackin' on that homemade breathalyser!

A couple of handy gadgets ? a 315 MHz RF Link transmitter and a 315 MHz RF link receiver. We also sell several other RF Link devices in different frequencies. Now sold individually. We have used these in the past and have been very happy with their performance and reliability.

The first of three new soldering tools for the artisans out there. This is a nifty brass sponge and base used to keep your soldering tip clean. It works better than the standard sponge and requires no water. Plus, it does wonders for those stubborn pots and pans - though we don't recommend it!