A New Product Post Crammed Full of New Stuff!

Another new product post crammed full of nifty products and even a contest thrown in.

It's Friday and we have quite a few new products to talk about. We have a lot of revisions, some stuff we found while cleaning house, and of course some new products. We even have a contest, so you might want to watch the video and see if you can win!

So there you have it. Go ahead and email your guess to contest@sparkfun.com. Please, only one entry per person. And remember that it's the closest without going over, so make your guess count!

If you've ever used a car stereo, you've probably used pots like these. These 10K pots pop out when you push them, and then retract back when you push them again. So you can panel mount them, and have them recessed when you don't need (or want) adjustment.

Stepper motors are fantastic for precise control. They usually have a set number of 'steps' per revolution, so you can easily control how much it moves. Using a stepper motor driver, you can build a CNC machine or anything that requires accurate movement. This small stepper motor has 48 steps per revolution, mounting tabs and a terminated wire harness.

We teach a lot of soldering classes. We have a lot of these soldering iron stands from some soldering classes we taught back in the day. We're clearing out some old inventory and found a box of these. Get them cheap while we have them! They have minor cosmetic signs of wear, but are otherwise functional.

In addition to the soldering iron stands, we also found some padded cases. SparkFun used to have this other company called In2Rowing and these cases held the In2Rowing Trinity. The Trinity is gone, but we still have some of the cases. They come in handy for parts storage or whatever else you want to use them for. Our round parts box fits in them very well.

Need to free up some pins on your microcontroller? Shift registers allow you to expand the amount of digital outputs you have on your microcontroller. The 74HC595 breakout gives you easy access to all the pins on the 74HC595 and is even setup to be chained together. 

A couple weeks ago we announced the Wixel. Last week we used it to make Mr. Twitchy. Now, there's a Wixel Shield so you can more easily use Wixels with your Arduino. Similar to an XBee shield, it allows your Arduino to communicate wirelessly with another Wixel that can be attached to either your USB port or another Arduino.

So, you can use the 74HC595 breakout to get a few extra digital outputs, but what if you need additional PWM pins? Well, we've got the PWM Shield which can give you up to 16 PWM signals from your Arduino with the help of the TLC594. The shield can even be connected to our TLC5490 Breakout to further expand your PWM'ing-ness.

If you're looking to build your own Arduino (for science!), you might have already gotten the Breadboard Arduino Compatible Parts Kit (or BBAC for short). If you have, you might want to transition it into something a bit more permanent, like a PCB. The Breadboard Arduino Compatible Parts Kit Add-On adds some extra components and a PCB to turn the original BBAC kit into a fully functioning Arduino-compatible development board. Keep in mind you will need the parts from the BBAC to use this add-on. Don't have the BBAC? Keep reading.

The Arduino-Compatible PTH Kit has everything you need to build your own Arduino-compatible development board. It comes with everything you see above and requires basic soldering skills. All you need is an FTDI to load your Arduino sketches. Sure, you could just buy your own Arduino, but what fun is that?

We have a lot of new revisions this week. First up, we have a new revision of the GPS shield. This new version includes a header for the new UP-501 GPS module and remains otherwise the same as the old version.

We've also fixed the issues with the Max Power IR LED Kit. The new kit has a better design and now drives the IR LED at its full potential.

Now that we have a good stock of the new HMC5883L magnetometer, we have a new version of our 9DoF Sensor Stick. It's essentially the same as the last version, but now uses the new HMC5883L instead of the HMC5843.

Our Luxeon Rebel LED Breakout has been upgraded with a higher-powered Rebel LED. We are now using the LMXL-PWC1-0120, which can make your eyes uncomfortable with up to 220 lumens of output. Seriously, don't drive this thing at full power and look at it. It's not fun.

We've also added the LMXL-PWC1-0120 onto our Luxeon Rebel LED Triple Play Breakout. So, if you thought 1 of these LEDs was too bright, wait until you see what 3 of them can do. Use them with a heatsink and one of our Luxeon Rebel LED driver boards.

In addition to our revisions, we also have a couple of new retail items. First, we're now selling the Danger Shield in retail packaging. The Danger Shield really is a fun board with a host of buttons, slide potentiometers and other sensors.

In addition to the Danger Shield, we also have the popular EZ1 ultrasonic rangefinder in retail packaging as well. Both of these can still be bought without the retail packaging.

We have a couple ICs left over from a product we no longer build. I'm sure they'd come in handy for someone. This is the NCP303, which is a voltage detector. Use these for low battery detection, power failure, or other applications where battery life needs to be closely monitored.

We've also got a BD10KA5W voltage regulator. This is a low saturation regulator with an output voltage precision of ±1%. We have a bunch of these left over so get them cheap.

There you have it, one of the bigger new product posts we've had in the past couple of months. Hopefully there's something useful for you in the list. We'll see you again next week for even more new products. Thanks for reading.