NEW PRODUCT – TIMESQUARE DIY Watch Kit – Red Display Matrix. Show up stylish AND on time to any event with this awesome looking DIY watch. We have a few watch kits here at Adafruit but we finally have one that looks good and fits well, even for ladies and kids and others with smaller wrists and hands. Its got a 8×8 bit matrix display and a repurposed silicone watch band for a professional look.
Engineered for greatness by PaintYourDragon, this watch squeezes 500-1000 full time displays out of a coin battery, and a up to one year ‘resting’ lifetime, so you can use this as a day-to-day time keeper.
This watch comes with a ultra bright red LED matrix and a black silicone watch band that fits all wrists from children to adult.
This is a DIY kit, and requires some basic soldering/assembly to put together. It is a beginner kit, so this is a fine project to use in learning how to solder. Tools are not included, you’ll need a soldering iron, solder and diagonal cutters as a minimum. Check the tutorial page for details on what tools and steps are required to assemble. Take about 1-2 hours to put together. Build it in the afternoon and you’ll be done in time to hit the clubs in the evening.
Raspbian is a free operating system based on Debian optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your Raspberry Pi run. However, Raspbian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 35,000 packages, pre-compiled software bundled in a nice format for easy installation on your Raspberry Pi. You can read more about Raspbian here. Kingston’s microSDHC cards use the new speed “class” rating of Class 4 that guarantee a minimum Data transfer rate of 4MB/sec.
NEW PRODUCT – Triple-axis Accelerometer+Magnetometer (Compass) Board – LSM303. He told you “Go West, young maker!” – but you don’t know which way is West! Ah, if only you had this triple-axis accelerometer/magnetometer compass module. Inside are two sensors, one is a classic 3-axis accelerometer, which can tell you which direction is down towards the Earth (by measuring gravity). The other is a magnetometer that can sense where the strongest magnetic force is coming from, generally used to detect magnetic north. By combining this data you can then orient your project!
We based this breakout on the latest version of this popular sensor, the LSM303DLHC. This compact sensor uses I2C to communicate and its very easy to use. Since it’s a 3.3V max chip, we added circuitry to make it 5V-safe logic and power, for easy use with either 3 or 5V microcomtrollers. Simply connect VCC to +3-5V and ground to ground. Then read data from the I2C clock and data pins. There’s also a Data Ready and two Interrupt pins you can use (check the LSM303 datasheet for details)
In this lesson, you will learn how to use a RGB (Red Green Blue) LED with an Arduino. You will use the analogWrite function of Arduino to control the color of the LED. At first glance, RGB (Red, Green, Blue) LEDs look just like regular LEDs, however, inside the usual LED package, there are actually three LEDs, one red, one green and yes, one blue. By controlling the brightness of each of the individual LEDs you can mix pretty much any color you want.
We mix colors just like you would mix audio with a ‘mixing board’ or paint on a palette – by adjusting the brightness of each of the three LEDs. The hard way to do this would be to use different value resistors (or variable resistors) as we played with in lesson 2. That’s a lot of work! Fortunately for us, the Arduino has an analogWrite function that you can use with pins marked with a ~ to output a variable amount of power to the appropriate LEDs.
Spice up your Arduino project with a beautiful large touchscreen display shield with built in microSD card connection. This TFT display is big (2.8″ diagonal) bright (4 white-LED backlight) and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 240×320 pixels with individual pixel control. It has way more resolution than a black and white 128×64 display. As a bonus, this display has a resistive touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen.
The shield is fully assembled, tested and ready to go. No wiring, no soldering! Simply plug it in and load up our library – you’ll have it running in under 10 minutes!
We don’t do meek post-it notes left for housemates. We build technical over-solutions as a hint to STOP DOING THAT THING!! A paean to the unsung, over-thought, and laboriously over-engineered black boxes around the space.
Music system boot-up control box. No one ever turns on the amps in the right order, or allows them to warm up properly, grrr! Solution: use a Raspberry Pi to control power and on-timing via solid state relays. The box also has a USB audio card (red thing) to allow the raspberry pi to stream audio out to the network from the house mixer. The whole box can ONLY be controlled across the network – there are ZERO switches and buttons on the front panel for ill-informed fingers to explore. (Brett & Daniel) Tech over-solution points: 8 (microcomputer, fuses, network, CNC & laser cut parts, DIY circuit board, rack case, +2 for NO FRONT PANEL BUTTONS AT ALL)
RF has always been fascinating to me — there’s something magical about sending and receiving bits and bytes over the air at high speed, through walls and concrete, out into space and back, etc. While RF has a reputation for being complex — and it can get messy depending on what you need to do — there are a number of platforms, products and tools out there that make RF more accessible for hobbyists than it’s probably ever been before. This quick holiday gift guide will hopefully highlight some of the tools you have at your disposal if you want to get started sending bits and bytes over the air yourself! (more…)
The innovative non-profit foundation Raspberry Pi has received an Internet and Society Award from the Oxford Internet Institute, in recognition of its exemplary efforts in using the Internet for the public good in Britain.
Raspberry Pi has developed an affordable, approachable pocket-sized computer that is already providing today’s children with unparalleled opportunities for learning to program. Digital computing and the Internet, with all the current emphasis on touch-screen visual cues and icons has for many become abstract and remote; with the advent of the Raspberry Pi we now have a credit-card sized computer we can hold in our hands and play with, reminding us of our capacity to tinker with technology, and the inherent mutability of the Internet itself.
Pete Lomas, Founder and Trustee at Raspberry Pi, said: “One of the key aims of Raspberry Pi is to allow children to taste software and electronic engineering across a broad spectrum of computing. From low level hardware interfacing through the full gamut of opportunities presented by web connectivity on an open and extensible platform.”
“Our vision is to engage children in the underlying technology that enriches the Internet and in turn people’s lives. I am honoured to receive this prestigious award from the Oxford Internet Institute on behalf of everyone in the foundation.”
The award was presented on 9 November in Oxford, at an awards dinner and ceremony that also included an Internet and Society Award for Jennifer Pahlka, and a Lifetime Achievement Award for Yochai Benkler.
OII Director, Professor Helen Margetts said: “We are delighted to make this award to Raspberry Pi whose generous-spirited innovation will help to ensure that the next Internet generation comes to appreciate the satisfaction to be gained from digital making and tinkering.”
The concept and prototypes behind the Raspberry Pi were developed between 2006 and 2008 by Eben Upton and colleagues at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, the project triggered by a perceived lack of computing skills amongst university applicants. The resulting device, which costs around £25, went into mass production in 2011 and hundreds of thousands have already been sold. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity.
We’re having a very busy, very mobile couple of days. We’ve been talking to Welsh teachers, spending time at the factory in Pencoed, doing EMC testing on the camera boards, picking up engineering samples of the Model A, visiting suppliers, and generally running up and down the south of England and Wales with our hair on fire. Sorry I wasn’t able to fit in a post here yesterday; I’ll make it up with an extra post over the weekend.
First up, here’s the very first (blurry, cameraphone) picture of a Model A board. I’ll take some more at the weekend with better detail when I’m near a proper camera.
..We’re pretty excited. The Model A is something we wanted to produce months ago, but the crazy demand for the Model B (volumes are actually, we think, a bit higher than we’d calculated; Farnell told us yesterday that they’ve shipped 429,000 so far, and I don’t have current figures for RS, but they’ll be only a little lower) has meant that we’ve not been able to build them, because to do so would mean that we have to cannibalise Model B parts – and that would mean that people who are experiencing the backlog would have to wait even longer. We’re hoping to get them off the line and into the hands of our distributors early in the new year, which will put us in a position where that strap line at the top of the page is actually accurate: you’ll be able to buy a $25 computer, which is what we’ve wanted to give you all along.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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