Adafruit got into the parts/kit business with its detailed tutorials that include step-by-step instructions and photographs to lead newbies through the basics of Ohm’s Law and soldering, and on to programming the open-source hardware Arduino platform. Unlike traditional electronic distributors that rely on application engineers, the site effectively crowdsources its application engineering support through its forums and FAQ pages on the kits and parts. This reliance on the knowledge of the site’s fans is part of a well-thought-out business plan: Adafruit’s founder, Limor Fried, detailed the company philosophy in, “15 steps to starting your own electronic-kit business.”
Individual parts offered by Adafruit benefit from its excellent documentation and tutorials. Speaking from personal experience, a couple of years ago I bought a TLS2561 light-to-digital converter from TAOS Semiconductor (now part of austriamicrosystems.) It seemed like a handy component to have in getting a quick, objective measurement of LEDs. However, although documentation existed for the part, its outputs were hard to interpret and it was not easy to hook it up to a computer for datalogging. I quickly gave up and forgot about it.
Then, last summer Adafruit introduced the a new product, aTLS2561 premounted on a small pc board with a couple of chip resistors and some headers, with a tutorial as well as a software library for the open-source Arduino platform. As theAdafruit tutorial says, “To use this sensor and calculate Lux, there’s a lot of very hairy and unpleasant math. You can check out the math in the datasheet but really, it’s not intuitive or educational – it’s just how the sensor works. So we took care of all the math and wrapped it up into a nice Arduino library.”
My sentiments exactly – I just wanted to start using the sensor. It worked great. (See photo, which shows a boarduino, a slimmed-down version of the arduino.) Adafruit was able to take a part that sells competitively for about $2 each, add a couple of passive components, and a well thought-out online tutorial, and sell it for $12. And it was worth every penny of it to me.
Digi-Key had a similar start back in 1972, selling its “Digi-Keyer Kit” to ham radio enthusiasts and today it’s a $1B company. History could repeat itself with a whole new generation of parts and kits providers.
NEW PRODUCT – Arduino Ethernet shield R3 with micro SD connector – Assembled. The Arduino Ethernet Shield R3 (assembled) allows an Arduino board to connect to the internet. It is based on the Wiznet W5100 ethernet chip (datasheet). The Wiznet W5100 provides a network (IP) stack capable of both TCP and UDP. It supports up to four simultaneous socket connections. Use the Ethernet library to write sketches which connect to the internet using the shield.
The new Ethernet shield now includes a micro SD card connector, it is MEGA compatible and an on-board reset controller.
The ethernet shield connects to an Arduino board using long wire-wrap headers which extend through the shield. This keeps the pin layout intact and allows another shield to be stacked on top.
Arduino uses digital pins 10, 11, 12, and 13 (SPI) to communicate with the W5100 on the ethernet shield. These pins cannot be used for general i/o.
The shield provides a standard RJ45 ethernet jack. An Arduino is necessary to use this shield but is not included.
Dimensions: 73mm x 54mm x 17mm (2.8in x 2.1in x 0.7in)
Weight: 26g / 1oz
For more information, check out the Ethernet shield page and Getting started guide. We have a tutorial on how to use this shield as a file webserver!
I bought this awesome RGB LED matrix panel from Adafruit and really wanted to see if I could make it display video from an Android phone.
16×32 RGB LED matrix panel – MASSIVE BLINKY!. Bring a little bit of Times Square into your home with this 16 x 32 RGB LED matrix panel. These panels are normally used to make video walls, here in New York we see them on the sides of busses and bus stops, to display animations or short video clips. We thought they looked really cool so we picked up a few boxes of them from a factory. They have 512 bright RGB LEDs arranged in a 16×32 grid on the front. On the back there is a PCB with two IDC connectors (one input, one output: in theory you can chain these together) and 12 16-bit latches that allow you to drive the display with a 1:8 scan rate.
Keep in mind that these displays are designed to be driven by FPGAs or other high speed processors: they do not have built in PWM control of any kind. Instead, you’re supposed to redraw the screen over and over to ‘manually’ PWM the whole thing. On a 16 MHz arduino, we managed to squeeze 9-bit color (512 colors) with 50% CPU usage but this display would really shine if driven by an FPGA, CPLD, Propeller, XMOS or other high speed multi-core controller. The good news is that the display is pre-white balanced with nice uniformity so if you turn on all the LEDs its not a particularly tinted white.
The first step in my Arduino monitored / controlled orchid vivarium is giving my Arduino the ability to track time with reasonable accuracy and display information on an LCD. I went with a Boarduino for ease of prototyping, but the final build will probably use an Uno or Mega.
Hey Phil/Limor, I just posted up my first kickstarter project (I’m a high-school student). It’s open-source, Arduino based, and awesome! I just wanted to let you guys know that you helped me get interested in electronics in the first place. After raising $455 in under 1.5 hours, I think I’ve picked a pretty good hobby.
Thanks so much for everything you guys! By the way — I taught a short term class at my school (which is about 4 weeks long) on the Arduino (we bought all of our kits, sensors, and LCDs from you guys) and it went GREAT!!!! Here’s a project one of my friends made during the second week (having never programmed before): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtwqUQUAPx8. You guys rock! -mjusticz
Now, depending on your level of knowledge of engineering, electronics, and other technical topics, you may be a little unclear on the definition of a microcontroller. At its most basic, a microcontroller is a computer on a chip. It has a CPU capable of executing embedded code, RAM for storage of run-time data, and long-term storage for storing the code to be executed. What makes microcontrollers fun is the surrounding hardware that is also on the chip. This surrounding hardware makes it very simple to read signals from the physical world, translate them into something the code can take action on, and then react back out to the physical world. The Arduino is a small circuit board wrapped around one of these microcontrollers that makes it very easy for you to upload new code that you write, in a variation on C++, and access the set of inputs/outputs and interact with your world. This answers this second part of my question above, “How can it help launch me into the world of cool projects?”
Our offices have these little peek-a-boo sections in the frosted glass. Some people stick post-it notes up describing what’s going on with them, but I wanted something more complex. I had recently picked up the Adafruit “RGB backlight negative LCD” display and was evaluating the X-Bee radios and decided to make an “almost wireless” LCD display for the front of my office. It’s not very complex – using a Boarduino (Arduino) running a little sketch that has a few modes – static text, alternating text describing what I’m working on, plus a mode that cycles through a bunch of “Burma Shave” four-liners just for silliness. The modes and backlight color are controlled from my PC via the other X-Bee. People seem to like it, so I’ll probably commit it to a perf-board and get rid of all those ugly wires.
RGB backlight positive LCD 20×4 + extras [black on RGB]. To match our popular 16×2 RGB Character LCDs (http://www.adafruit.com/products/399 & http://www.adafruit.com/products/398) we’ve now added 20×4 LCDs! Get more text, with an RGB backlight. Both positive and negative type! This is a fancy upgrade to standard 20×4 LCDs, instead of just having blue and white, or red and black, this LCD has black characters on a full color RGB background! That means you can change the display background color to anything you want – red, green, blue, pink, white, purple yellow, teal, salmon, chartreuse. This LCD looks strikingly good in person. This LCD is the most daylight readable character LCD we have and is very beautiful and easy to read no matter what color/brightness you have for the backlight.
One nice thing about these LCDs is that they are an elegant upgrade, but you can use them in existing LCD projects and they’ll still work – just that only the red LED will be used (so it will appear black-on-red). The extra two pins (17 and 18) are for the green and blue LEDs. The LCD has resistors on board already so that you can drive it with 5V logic and the current draw will be ~40mA per LED (there are two LEDs, 20mA each). There’s a single LED backlight for the entire display, the image above showing 3 colors at once is a composite!
Comes with a single 20×4 RGB backlight LCD, 10K necessary contrast potentiometer and strip of header. Our tutorials and diagrams will have you up and running in no time!
BACK IN STOCK – Atmega32u4 Breakout Board. Toss out those FTDI cables and go USB-native with the ATmega32u4. After many months of back-orders, we finally received a shipment of these little guys and are excited to offer our breakout board. The little dev board keeps it simple, with just the bare essentials:
Atmega32u4 – AVR core with USB capability. 32K flash, 2.5K RAM running at 16MHz
Standard AVR 6-pin ISP connector for direct programming (when you need the extra space)
Big Bootload/Reset button
500mA fuse on the USB power line
Power LED and ‘user’ LED (also indicates when the bootloader is active)
Fits nicely in any breadboard
4 mounting holes
This breakout board is best for those who have familiarity with some microcontrollers and are comfortable with writing code in C. This board doesn’t come with any ‘learn to program’ tutorials! If this is your first time with a microcontroller, we suggest going with an Arduino which is easier. Then when you want to upgrade, check this out.
Plug it in, connect a mini-B USB cable and you can start writing code immediately. With the built-in bootloader you don’t even need an AVR programmer. We suggest checking out the LUFA library to get started with the USB core as nearly every kind of device has an example already.
Arduino is an open embedded hardware and software platform designed for rapid creativity. It’s both a great introduction to embedded programming and a fast track to building all kinds of cool devices like animatronics, robots, fabulous blinky things, animated clothing, games, your own little fabs… you can build what you imagine. Follow along as we learn both embedded programming and basic electronics.
LED screen teardown, driving LEDs with video, mikeselectricstuff writes -
I just took apart a piece of the commercial outdoor LED screen that used to be in London’s Piccadilly Circus. Also included is a detailed analysis of the drive waveforms etc. which may be of interest to people trying to seriously use the 32×16 RGB modules
We carry 32×16 and 32×32 LED wall sections in the shop! Complete with Arduino wiring diagrams and libraries.
32×32 RGB LED matrix panel! Bring a little bit of Times Square into your home with this totally adorable 5 inch square 32 x 32 RGB LED matrix panel. These panels are normally used to make video walls, here in New York we see them on the sides of busses and bus stops, to display animations or short video clips. We thought they looked really cool so we picked up a few boxes of them from a factory. They have 1024 bright RGB LEDs arranged in a 32×32 grid on the front. On the back there is a PCB with two sets of dual IDC connectors (two input, two output: in theory you can chain these together) and 12 16-bit latches that allow you to drive the display with a 1:16 scan rate.
These displays are ‘chainable’ – connect one output to the next input – but our Arduino example code does not support this (yet). It requires a high speed processor and more RAM than the Arduino has!
These panels require 13 digital pins (6 bit data, 7 bit control) and a good 5V supply, up to 2A per panel. We suggest our 2A regulated 5V adapter and then connecting a 2.1mm jack Please check out our tutorial for more details!
Comes with: a single 32×32 RGB panel, two IDC cables, a power cable, 4 mounting screws and mini-magnets (it appears these are often mounted on a magnetic base)
Keep in mind that these displays are designed to be driven by FPGAs or other high speed processors: they do not have built in PWM control of any kind. Instead, you’re supposed to redraw the screen over and over to ‘manually’ PWM the whole thing. On a 16 MHz arduino, we managed to squeeze 12-bit color (4096 colors) with 40% CPU usage but this display would really shine if driven by any FPGA, CPLD, Propeller, XMOS or other high speed multi-core controller. The good news is that the display is pre-white balanced with nice uniformity so if you turn on all the LEDs its not a particularly tinted white.
Andreas Böhler and Anja Hartig, two fellow students and I, are currently working on ‘A Game of Choices’, an interactive claymation flash-game. We built different clay-sets, that the stop motion animated character will later walk through. In order to achieve a smooth walk-through experience, we photographed the 100 cm wide set in 200 highly precise steps. When it comes to precision photography, one can find dozens of systems available. However, professional systems are expensive and therefore out of reach for this project.
As I had recently begun playing with the open-source hardware-platform Arduino, I decided to take it a step further and build a single axis motion control myself. The basic configuration was quickly developed and assembled, however, it presented some severe issues. For example, the shafts were too weak to handle heavy lenses, as the platform would lean to one side. I had to reinforce the system with a second set of shafts that now allows it to handle up to 3 kg of mounted weight.
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If you don’t have great knowledge about electronics, you might want to look into some basics or you’re most probably going to blow up some chips and LEDs – at least that’s what I did… After all, this project was fun and very interesting as it was my first step into the world of physical computing. The possibilities are exciting and I can’t wait to start my next Arduino project – right now, I’m just spoiled for choice.
No project details yet, though it’s still a nice proof-of-concept for this kind of thing.
Ladyada, Kevin and PT did a tour of the Arduino factory in beautiful Torino, Italy. We took many photos, some videos and more. On this weekend’s ASK AN ENGINEER we will go photo by photo (and video) and talk about all the wonderful machines, tools and people that make the Arduino. Tune in TONIGHT at 10pm ET 1/14/12.
We’d like to also thank everyone at the Arduino team and supporting company’s for being so kind and generous during our stay.
I built a controller so that I can open and close my curtains from the command line! My apartment has a 16′ wide floor-to-ceiling window, and a correspondingly-huge curtain. I wanted to put the curtain under software control so I could do things like, for example, have it automatically open in the morning to help me get out of bed.
The Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE is a $10 million global competition to stimulate innovation and integration of precision diagnostic technologies, making reliable health diagnoses available directly to “health consumers” in their homes.
The dire need for improvements in health and healthcare in the U.S. has captured the attention of government, industry, and private citizens for years. But a viable solution has yet evaded one of the most technologically advanced, educated and prosperous nations on the globe. Integrated diagnostic technology, once available on a consumer mobile device that is easy to use, will allow individuals to incorporate health knowledge and decision-making into their daily lives.
Advances in fields such as artificial intelligence, wireless sensing, imaging diagnostics, lab-on-a-chip, and molecular biology will enable better choices in when, where, and how individuals receive care, thus making healthcare more convenient, affordable, and accessible. The winner will be the team whose technology most accurately diagnoses a set of diseases independent of a healthcare professional or facility, and that provides the best consumer user experience with their device.
Printable catalog (PDF)
I designed and built a custom Arduino shield and wrote some firmware and software that turn it into a web-connected universal remote…
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