New Product Post: Mega Fiber Edition
We only have a few products, but what was lack in quantity is
Hello everyone! It's a light week for new products, but we still have enough to talk about and show you. There are certainly enough cool things in here to make someone excited. So let's see what we have in the video for this week.
The conductive fiber has a peculiar texture. It feels like a cross between silk and steel wool. In any event, I'm curious to see what people end up using it for.
First off, just want to post a reminder of the SparkFun Simon Sketch Class taking place this coming Tuesday, October 11th. In this class, you'll learn how to turn you Simon into a drawing tool on your computer. Add a breadboard, a few dials, an FTDI connection to processing, and you're ready to go. This class is designed for people with some Arduino experience, but little to no experience in processing. Bring your own Simon and we'll get to hacking!
Many of you might be familiar with our 'Pro' series. We have the Arduino Pro and the Arduino Pro Mini. Essentially, they are stripped down versions of the regular Arduino which makes for a cheaper board which is easier to embed. They have been very successful and I tend to use a Pro Mini in almost any one of my own projects. Now we have a Pro version of the Mega. The Pro Mega is similar to the Mega 2560, but does away with the barrel jack, USB section, and headers. What you have left is a very slim board that can still accept shields, but runs at 3.3V so you can use it with a LiPo battery.
Fiber optics are neat. They are an easy way to transport light from one place to another quite efficiently. This fiber optic cable can do exactly that. It's 5 meters in length and about 3.25mm in diameter. Strip back the jacket to expose the 64 individual fibers. The size makes it easy to heat-shrink a 3mm LED on to one end.
For all you e-textile fans out there, we have a new product for you. If you've ever wanted to make your own conductive thread, yarn, or even felt, you might want to check out this conductive fiber. It's a raw fiber made from stainless steel and can be woven into whatever you want, and even mixed with other fibers to create your own threads or yarns.
So remember that illuminated rotary encoder we talked about awhile back? Well maybe this will jog your memory. I promised we'd have a breakout board for the encoder and here it is. Add a circular bargraph and a rotary encoder and you have a great input device with visual feedback.
So, that's it for this week. I will make you one promise. For those of you who actually enjoy the 'entertainment' portion of these posts (and video), you might want to check back next week, we have something planned. We'll see you again next week and thanks for reading!
