NEW PRODUCT – SMT Test Socket – SOIC-8 Narrow Breakout – You know those ZIF sockets we have for DIP chips? Well these are just like that but for SMT parts! Yeah, that’s right, now you can program and test out your favorite new parts in SOIC Narrow, SOIC Medium, SOIC Wide and, TSSOP packages.
This test socket is good for any SOIC/SOP “Narrow” 8 pin chip in a 150mil wide body. Simply press down on the top, place the chip in carefully and then release to latch the chip in. The chip is held securely against gold ‘fingers’ in the socket. 200mil or wider chips will not fit, but we do have other sockets for medium/wide SOIC chips.
The socket is soldered onto a pair of PCBs that turn it into, essentially, a 16 pin DIP with 0.6″ spacing that can be breadboarded fairly easily. Since the socket is a 16 pin socket that has been sectioned off to be only 8 pin, there are 16 pins in the breadboard, simply use 4 on each side and ignore the other 8 pins – they do provide mechanical stability when plugged into a breadboard.
Simply press down on the top, place the chip in carefully and then release to latch the chip in. The chip is held securely against gold ‘fingers’ in the socket. 200mil or wider chips will not fit, but we do have other sockets for medium/wide SOIC chips.
The socket is soldered onto a pair of PCBs that turn it into, essentially, a 16 pin DIP with 0.6″ spacing that can be breadboarded fairly easily.
Simply press down on the top, place the chip in carefully and then release to latch the chip in. The chip is held securely against gold ‘fingers’ in the socket. 150 or 300mil wide chips will not fit, but we do have other sockets for narrow/wide SOIC chips.
The socket is soldered onto a pair of PCBs that turn it into, essentially, a 20 pin DIP with 0.6″ spacing that can be breadboarded fairly easily.
Simply open the latch, place the chip in carefully and then close the top over it. The chip is held securely against gold ‘fingers’ in the socket.
The socket is soldered onto a pair of PCBs that turn it into, essentially, a 28 pin DIP with 0.6″ spacing that can be breadboarded fairly easily.
NEW PRODUCT – SMT Test Socket – TSSOP-28 Breakout – This test sockets is good for any 4.4mm / 0.147″ wide TSSOP/SSOP with up to 28 pins. Simply press down on the top, place the chip in carefully and then release to latch the chip in.
The chip is held securely against gold ‘fingers’ in the socket. Please note the body of the chip you’re trying to use, for example the FT232RL has a 5.3mm wide body, and will not fit!
The socket is soldered onto a pair of PCBs that turn it into, essentially, a 28 pin DIP with 0.6″ spacing that can be breadboarded fairly easily.
The test socket is a high quality, Japanese construction from Yamaichi.
In this lesson you will learn how to use a PIR movement detector with an Arduino and to have the Arduino communicate with a Python program running on your computer to send an email whenever movement is detected by the sensor.
Check out this Longboard Deck that the designer admits to being more 3D “themed” that entirely 3D printing. Still really awesome — also because he can actively use it! From BuildLog.net:
I played with some ideas and thought it would look cool to make the lines look more like filament by giving them some height off the surface. I kicked around a lot of materials from paracord to thick wires, to actual 3mm filament. I finally decided to use rubber oring cord stock. It would be a low cost, practical material and also be durable with a nice feel under the feet. As I played with that, it hit me that I should switch concepts and make it look like the whole board was printed. The OSHW logo was a little complex to work in the new design, so I switched to the simpler reprap teardrop logo.
I start by loading some really ludicrously large values into Slic3r, like a 4mm nozzle diameter and giant work envelope. It actually did not mind and sliced the long board up like it was ready to print it. I snipped out one of the inner layers from the G-code and loaded it into a CAD program. I had to manually make a lot of changes for aesthetic and practical purposes. The oring was going to lay into a groove cut with a ball end mill. To look best, the number free ends needed to be reduced and I needed to add a reasonable bend radius to the corners. I really wanted to do a hex infill pattern, but there was just not enough space on the board to do a good job of it, especially around the logo. The logo was printed about 4mm thick in bright green ABS.
Here is the process I followed
Cut the blank on a CNC router out of 18mm baltic birch
Pocketed holes for inserts for the truck mounting screws on the back (I did not want them to show on the top)
Rounded the edges with a 1/4″ radius bit on a manual router table.
Finished with several coats of water based semi gloss varnish.
Cut a pocket for the printed logo using a 1/8″ bit.
Cut the grooves for the oring with a 9/64 (0.141) ball end mill.
Glued in the oring using super glue. For some areas I pretreated the oring with accelerator.
Installed the oring.
What I learned
I normally use spare varnish for a job like this, but I had to do all the coating inside and had limited time. Oil based spare varnish cuts cleanly on the router. The water based stuff did not cut cleanly and needed about an hour of manual cleanup after.
I would get a needle tip for the glue. A tiny bead down the center of the groove would have been best.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Adafruit has always prided itself on going the extra mile. We always try to provide the the best breakouts possible, but we also put that extra bit of effort into making sure we have a driver for each of those products as well. You want to get started with your new HW as soon as you pull it out of that box … we’re happy to try to make that possible to the best extent that we can! Call it the Adafruit Difference.
That said … writing all those drivers can be pretty time consuming, and then you need to add some example code on top of them to show how the driver works. While I was digging around inside the Android source code for something different, I noticed the intelligent way they abstract away all sensor data down to a single C typedef. The dial went straight to 11 in my head, and the first thing I thought was: ‘why am I not doing this?!?’. I pulled out an MCU and tried to adapt the Android code (conveniently written in C), slimming the typedefs down a bit, adding a couple sensor types, … but keeping the same general structure. After a bit of trial and error, the Adafruit Unified Sensor Driver was born. Driver use and development will never be the same (at least for me)!
We have a reasonably complete tutorial on how the Unified Sensor Driver System works … but you can also have a look at the source code for Adafruit_Sensor on github. In a nutshell what does this do, though? Essentially, it takes any supported sensor type (accelerometers, gyroscopes, pressure sensors, light sensors, etc.) and converts the raw units used by the system (0..1023) into standard SI units on a specific scale. Every accelerometer using the system will report acceleration in m/s^2, pressure sensors will all use hectoPascal (hPa), light sensors use SI lux units, etc.! No more 0..1023 … you get units you understand out of the box and every time!
Don’t know which accelerometer to use, or what speed or resolution you need? No problem … start with whatever you’ve got, and you can just drop in any other ‘Unified’ sensor later. You’ll get exactly the same SI unit types and scales, call the same two functions, and all you need to change in the single line constructor! No more out of stock headaches … just take any other similar sensor and use that as a stand-in, and you don’t have to relearn a whole new driver and set of functions.
But have a look at the learning guide, the source code, and try it out if you have a product that currently has a ‘Unified’ drivers (there’s a list here). And above all, let us know what you think and what can be improved. This is still a bit of an experiment for us, but it definitely feels like the right direction to move things!
PyCon is the largest annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Pythonprogramming language. It is produced and underwritten by the Python Software Foundation, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing and promoting Python. Through PyCon, the PSF advances its mission of growing the international community of Python programmers.
Because PyCon is backed by the non-profit PSF, we keep registration costs much lower than comparable technology conferences so that PyCon remains accessible to the widest group possible. The PSF also pays for the ongoing development of the software that runs PyCon and makes it available under a liberal open source license (currently available at the PyCon github project).
Python – Skill badge, iron-on patch. You’ve learned the Python programming language! Python is an easy-to-learn and programming language that’s popular for its powerful capabilities and human-readable code. The Python logo is used with permission from the Python Foundation.
Adafruit offers a fun and exciting “badges” to celebrate achievement for electronics, science and engineering. We believe everyone should be able to be rewarded for learning a useful skill, a badge is just one of the many ways to show and share.
Check out this excellent interview with 3Doodler Co-Creator Max Bogue by Eric Weinhoffer from MAKE. Here is a short selection of the longer interview:
How did this all come about? There’s quite a gap between telepresence robots and a 3D Printing pen…
We previously had two Up! 3D Printers. Peter Dilworth was watching one print away, when it made an error. He was kinda miffed about it; he just wanted to take the thing off the platform, fill up the gap, and put it back on. And then he had that “Oh! We can!” moment.
So we took apart one of the Up! machines and used the print head to make a really crude 3Doodler. We added a little handle, and pretty quickly ended up with the first prototype. It was dubbed “the Teacup”, and it worked, albeit terribly. We thought “maybe there’s something here”. From there we made another version with an Arduino, and then we added a shell and fans to contain everything and cool the plastic. “The Beast” was the first prototype with all the subassemblies integrated in one package. It was all metal on the inside with an ABS shell, and it worked pretty well.
We ended up working through 5 prototypes before ending up with what you see in the Kickstarter video. Everyone’s going to be getting the 6th version, with a few additional tweaks – we’re changing the shell to make it fit better in your hand, and with a flat bottom so it doesn’t roll. We’ve received great responses from Kickstarter; the community aspect is amazing for something like this, because it’s going to help us make a better product.
Can you talk about the physical interface of the 3Doodler? How is it used?
There are two buttons near the front. Pressing one extrudes the plastic slowly, for delicate work, while the other will extrude quicker, for filling things in. And when you let go of one of the buttons, the motor retracts the plastic a little bit, just like a normal printer, so you don’t get a lot of drooping. If you press down both buttons at the same time the flow of plastic will reverse, so you can switch colors easily.
There’s a 3-way switch on the back of the device, for PLA/ABS/Off. While the nozzle is heating up, the LED glows red, and switches to blue once it’s ready to go. If it cools down too much during doodling, the blue changes to red and will automatically stop the extrusion so you can’t jam up the nozzle. It’ll go back up to the correct temperature and the buttons start working again. We were shooting for simplicity and ease of use; I think we struck the balance with that.
I read about a cooling-related patent on the Kickstarter page. Can you explain the reasoning behind that?
We filed a patent purely for protection from larger corporations. We’re not going after the community – if people want to make one on their own, go for it! That’s a lot different than a larger company making mass quantities. We’re not going to argue that we have large swathes of the market or anything, we just focused on our item and defending against it getting knocked off. It is leveraged off of a pre-existing patent, which strengthens it’s validity….
Adafruit is a high-tech company, run by fairly young people. All of us working here have spend our lives with computers, technology and the Internet. So its not surprising that software and software-as-services (SaaS) are an essential part of running Adafruit. We’re constantly on the lookout for useful new tools that can help Adafruit run effeciently, and cleanly.
Check out this helpful post about how a team planned for Open Manufacturing for a project involving a BeagleBone. From IHeartRobotics:
The first thing is to frame what you want to build by constructing a list of constraints and intentions for guidance. In our case, we decided it needed to consider following:
Access to all of the ports with special consideration given to SD Card removal.
Maintaining minimal dimensions
Able to be mounted to the TurtleBot using a universal set of mounting holes.
3D Printable Design
Doing this creates the “world” that your design lives in and as such the tools you may consider using and the initial ideas for construction.
The next step is to obtain or create a 3D Cad replica of the Beagle Bone board. If one has to create their own model for testing, it’s best to note that only the major dimensions of the board and components necessary to the case are needed, but they must be accurate. These include the board itself, it’s ports, mounting holes, and anything that one may feel needs to be built around to complete the case.
Now that we have a physical and 3D model of the Beagle Bone, we can start to draw out the general outline and order of feature construction. I personally rough out a general model idea on paper and then begin creating in a CAD program of choice with the frame. Testing and experimentation are important parts of the design process. I constructed a rough case frame that wraps around the Beagle Bone and printed the piece to test the tolerances and fit. Doing this is beneficial to designers as it saves time over the long term versus running into an unaccounted error later in the process. The idea uses empirical analysis to verify quantitative and qualitative data….
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Lithium Polymer Batteries pack a lot of power in a small package. But they can be tricky to charge safely. The Adafruit LiPo Chargers all provide a charging cycle designed to safely charge 3.7v Lithium Polymer cells. But what if your project needs more than 3.7v?
Simply pumping more voltage into a multi-cell pack is risky. If the cells become unbalanced, some will end up with more of a charge than others. When put into service, the cells with the higher charge will end up working harder than the other cells. This will have an adverse effect on the capacity of the pack. Over time, it can result in damage and/or failure of one or more cells. And LiPo failures have been known to be quite spectacular.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Here’s a great piece of 3D printed camera gear shared by Eric Chu at MAKE for their #3dthursday series:
I made a flash diffuser for the Canon Speedlight 580EX II after seeing our photo intern taping a piece of paper to his flash to act as a light bounce. His paper bounce didn’t last more than a few days of project photography in the extreme conditions of our lab, so after seeing him repeatedly throw them into the recycling bin, I decided to make him a durable 3D printed diffuser. After talking to him to learn more about what shapes make a good diffuser, I modeled it in Autodesk Inventor and 3D printed them on an Ultimaker in clear PLA, a biodegradable, corn-based plastic.
I started out with the rectangular version to test the fit, and got very lucky since it fitted the flash snugly. After I knew that the fit was good, I made the triangular version, which maximizes surface area for greater light diffusion.
Both versions of the diffuser were printed using the Joris setting in Cura, which allows the part to be printed out in a gradual spiral. Even with just one wall, the part’s quite strong, since there’s no seam running along the side of the part.
A challenge I ran into while modeling the diffuser was that the body of the flash was not just a simple rectangle (it actually consists of a lot of curves), so I couldn’t easily or accurately measure the dimensions of it. This meant that I couldn’t make the diffuser that would perfectly contour around it. Instead, I settled on measuring the max width, length, height, a small curve on the front, and the two grooves on the sides of the flash, to allow the diffuser to slide up or down.
They’ve been holding up even after over a month of daily use and work very well for taking photos that end up online or in our magazine. The files and printing instructions are available for download on Thingiverse here.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Printable catalog (PDF) or (EPUB)
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