Really Cool Projects from Home and Abroad
We've got a little bit of everything on this post. A USB Touchscreen Mouse, the Citizen Engineer comic book, cool customer projects, the 4th SparkFun summer school class, and of course, a few new products.
Alright, we've got a bunch of really cool stuff to show you all. First off; the AVR based USB Touchscreen Mouse tutorial using our PSP touchscreen.
Vimeo seems to be having problems at the moment. Watch the video here if it doesn't load.
Lady Ada and PT from adafuit industries have created a comic book-style learning guide called Citizen Engineer to specifically fill a void that's out there - "there aren't any comics that have women as the heros or comics that actually teach you something in a non-lame way." Volume 01 is the SIM card hack.
Here are some science worthy projects that rely heavily on SparkFun resources. Using our 5DOF IMU, 3DOF IMU, 6DOF v4 IMU, and Logomatic, a graduate group from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia studied the effects of turbulence on various RC aircraft configurations. In addition, the IMUs were used to study aerobatics, not only for the RC planes, but for snowboarders as well (notice the blue boxes on the snowboarder's goggle straps and board). Great work Mujahid!
This is a laser based hand sensor for speed rock climbing that uses SparkFun's laser module and light sensor. Nice work Landon!
SparkFun's 4th summer school class is on Monday, July 20th. We will be teaching how to solder surface mount and through-hole components. By the end of the night, you will have a functioning Simon game to take home and show off to your friends. Sign up here!
To help with your soldering, we now have some new helpful tools; a third hand and an illuminated monocle magnifier.
This little guy is a hall effect sensor. Commonly used for magnetic sensing in devices like the trackball on the Android phone.
