Another Illuminating Product Post
Lights, Printers, Current! We have some cool stuff this week, so check out this Thursday New Product Post.
First off, a quick announcement - there was some confusion about the expiration of Free Day credits. To make sure everyone has a chance to use their credit if they haven't already, Free Day funds will expire March 15th, not March 13th (as previously reported). Now back to our regular programming...
Like clockwork, it's Thursday, so that means another round of new products. So sit back and take a break from watching Charlie Sheen constantly 'winning' and take a look at some cool new products.
Oh, the best of times indeed. I tried my best to refrain from puns this week and kept it all high-brow with Dickens.
Buttons are pretty useful for input and LEDs are great for feedback. So what happens when you combine them? You get our new LED tactile buttons! They combine a standard tactile button with various colored LEDs. So not only can you use the button for input, but you can use it to get feedback as well. Or you can just use them to look cool. We have them in 5 colors, white, green, orange, red, and blue.
The LED pins that come off the LED tactile buttons make them very difficult to use in a breadboard. Thankfully, we have a breakout board for them! We kept it really simple with this board, only breaking out what you need to get the button working. Use our boards or use the layout to make your own.
Looking to make your print functions really come to life? Well, with this thermal printer, you can do that, literally. Now your lowly microcontroller can print messages to the real world on some thermal paper (the same stuff used in receipts and such). You can even do barcodes and poor ACSII art! We also have some example code that will get your printing in no time.
We already have a few current sensors, but what if you don't want to cut wires and hack the sensor into the circuit? Here is a non-invasive 30A current sensor. It simply clamps around a wire and outputs a voltage corresponding to the current running through your wire. These can be quite handy if you are trying to lower or monitor your power consumption, or just to know how much current you're drawing.
Building your own radio was the "hello world" or "blink" back in the days. Now radios are commonplace and making your own isn't as 'cool' as it once was. But, with the new Si4703 Breakout Board, you can utilize all the modern features of radio in one small board. Now you can process both RDS and RBDS, song data, and much more.
We now have an evaluation shield for the SM130 Mifare RFID module. The shield has a header for an XBee module, the SM130 module and even includes a PCB trace antenna. Now you can start reading and writing Mifare RFID tags with your Arduino.
Not everyone is completely on-board with the new micro-USB connector. We decided to offer our LiPo Charger Basic with both micro-USB and now a mini-USB connector. Now you can choose which charger you want based on the cables you probably already have.
We have a minor revision to our Bluetooth DIP Module. There's really nothing too important to mention here. It uses the same RN-41 module, but has a few minor silkscreen changes. But, we have them back in stock and ready for your next Bluetooth project.
Well, there you have it, another Thursday New Product Post. I'm really curious to see some cool projects with some of the new products from this week. Thanks for reading and we'll be back next week.
