NEW PRODUCT – Adafruit Push-button Power Switch Breakout – The Adafruit Push-button Power Switch is a tidy little design that lets you control a DC power source using an everyday tactile button. The circuitry uses a latching analog circuit that is triggered by a push of the button. Press once to turn on, then press again to turn off. The circuit uses a 3A P-FET to connect and disconnect the IN pin to the OUT pin. Works great from 3V to 14VDC and up to 3A (although the FET gets a little toasty at continuous 3A draw) yet has only 0.5uA quiescent current draw.
Using it is easy: connect the power source to Ground and IN, then the load from Ground to OUT. We include a 12mm tactile switch that works well but you can solder in your own switch as well. Press the button (or short the button pins) to alternate between on or off. A on-board red LED will light up when active so you know its working. There’s a fourth KILL pin, which you can use to turn off the load and/or keep it off even if the button is pressed. When 1 or more volts is applied it will instantly turn off the FET. This allows your project to turn itself off.
Comes with a assembled & tested bread-board friendly breakout board with four mounting holes, a 12mm tactile button, and some 0.1″ male header you can solder to the board to plug it into a breadboard.
The power switch is an elegant way to control power to your project, but there are some things to keep in mind: since there is a pass FET, this is only for 3-14V DC voltages. This is not a mechanical switch so there is no air-gap isolation. There is a ‘body diode’ in the pass FET so if the load has a voltage on it that is higher than the input voltage, current will flow back to the input. There is built-in debouncing but very bouncy switches can be annoying as they will turn on and off fast instead of latching.
Technical Details:
Dimensions: 20.51mm / 0.8″ x 17.75mm / 0.69″ x 2.66mm / 0.1″
BMP085 Barometric Pressure/Temperature/Altitude Sensor- 5V ready - This precision sensor from Bosch is the best low-cost sensing solution for measuring barometric pressure and temperature. Because pressure changes with altitude you can also use it as an altimeter! The sensor is soldered onto a PCB with a 3.3V regulator, I2C level shifter and pull-up resistors on the I2C pins.
NEW! We now have a fully 5V compliant version of this board – a 3.3V regulator and a i2c level shifter circuit is included so you can use this sensor safely with 5V logic and power
NEW PRODUCT – VS1053 Codec + MicroSD Breakout – MP3/WAV/MIDI/OGG Play + Record – This breakout board is the ultimate companion for the VLSI VS1053B DSP codec chip. The VS1053 can decode a wide variety of audio formats such as MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, MIDI, FLAC, WAV (PCM and ADPCM). It can also be used to record audio in both PCM (WAV) and compressed Ogg Vorbis. You can do all sorts of stuff with the audio as well such as adjusting bass, treble, and volume digitally. There is also 8 GPIO pins that can be used for stuff like lighting up small LEDs or reading buttons.
All this functionality is implemented in a light-weight SPI interface so nearly any microcontroller can play audio from an SD card. There’s also a special MIDI mode that you can boot the chip into that will read ‘classic’ 31250Kbaud MIDI data on a UART pin and act like a synth/drum machine – there are dozens of built-in drum and sample effects! But the chip is a pain to solder, and needs a lot of extras. That’s why we spun up the best breakout, perfect for use with an Arduino but also good for other microcontrollers that just don’t have the computational power to decode MP3s.
The breakout is slim enough to fit on a breadboard with 1 row of holes left over for wiring. There’s 3.3v and 1.8v regulators onboard with ferrite beads and analog filtering for quality analog output. There’s a microphone input port that you can wire up a line-in or mic to and record compressed audio. All 8 GPIO are broken out and they all have built in 100K pulldowns, simply connect your button from the GPIO pin to 3.3V for an active-high connection. You’ll likely want to play music from a microSD card so we added a holder on-board. And since we know so many of our customers use 5V microcontrollers like the Arduino, we made the interface pins all 5V compliant with level shifters so you can use the chip at 3V or 5V power/logic!
Each order comes with a fully assembled and tested breakout board, some 0.1″ male header you can solder to the breakout so it plugs into a breadboard and a bonus stereo headphone jack that will be handy when you want to plug headphones in!
Add light-reactive sensing to your wearable Flora project with this high precision Lux sensor. The TSL2561 luminosity sensor is an advanced digital light sensor, ideal for use in a wide range of light situations. Compared to low cost CdS cells, this sensor is more precise, allowing for exact lux calculations and can be configured for different gain/timing ranges to detect light ranges from up to 0.1 – 40,000+ Lux on the fly. The best part of this sensor is that it contains both infrared and full spectrum diodes! That means you can separately measure infrared, full-spectrum or human-visible light. Most sensors can only detect one or the other, which does not accurately represent what human eyes see (since we cannot perceive the IR light that is detected by most photo diodes).
The sensor has a digital (I2C) interface. Attaching it to the flora is simple: line up the sensor so its adjacent to the SDA/SCL pins and sew conductive thread from the 3V, SDA, SCL and GND pins. They line up perfectly so you will not have any crossed lines. You can only connect one lux sensor to your Flora, but you can connect other I2C sensors/outputs by using the set of SCL/SDA pins on the opposite side. The current draw is extremely low, about 0.5mA when actively sensing, and less than 15 uA when in powerdown mode.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
I wrote a tutorial on interfacing with the Adafruit’s DS1307 realtime clock (RTC) breakout board using BusPirate. I noticed that your DS1307 tutorial covers soldering and links to Arduino example code and library, but thought my post might be useful additional resource.
This incredibly small stereo amplifier is surprisingly powerful – able to deliver 2 x 3.7W channels into 3 ohm impedance speakers. Inside the miniature chip is a class D controller, able to run from 2.7V-5.5VDC. Since the amp is a class D, its incredibly efficient (over 90% efficient when driving an 8Ω speaker at over a Watt).
This amplifier is perfect for portable and battery-powered projects. It has built in thermal and over-current protection, but you really have to drive it hard before it even gets warm! This board is a welcome upgrade to basic “LM386″ amps!
NEW PRODUCT – ADXL345 – Triple-Axis Accelerometer (+-2g/4g/8g/16g) w/ I2C/SPI – Filling out our accelerometer offerings, we now have the really lovely digital ADXL345 from Analog Devices, a triple-axis accelerometer with digital I2C and SPI interface breakout. We added an on-board 3.3V regulator and logic-level shifting circuitry, making it a perfect choice for interfacing with any 3V or 5V microcontroller such as the Arduino.
The sensor has three axes of measurements, X Y Z, and pins that can be used either as I2C or SPI digital interfacing. You can set the sensitivity level to either +-2g, +-4g, +-8g or +-16g. The lower range gives more resolution for slow movements, the higher range is good for high speed tracking. The ADXL345 is the latest and greatest from Analog Devices, known for their exceptional quality MEMS devices. The VCC takes up to 5V in and regulates it to 3.3V with an output pin.
Fully assembled and tested. Comes with 9 pin 0.1″ standard header in case you want to use it with a breadboard or perfboard. Two 2.5mm (0.1″) mounting holes for easy attachment.
Get started in a jiffy with the Adafruit Arduino library for the ADXL345! Simply connect the VIN pin to 3-5V power, GND to ground, SCL to I2C clock (also known as A5 on an UNO), SDA to I2C data (aka A4 on UNO). Then download the library and uncompress it. Rename the folder inside Adafruit_ADXL345 and check it contains a .cpp and .h file. Place the folder into your Arduino libraries folder. Check out our tutorial about libraries if its your first library installation.
NEW PRODUCT – SMT Breakout PCB Set For SOT-23, SOT-89, SOT-223 and TO252 – Beguiled by a fancy new chip, regulator or transistor that is only available in a SOT23-3, SOT23-5, SOT23-6, SOT-223, SOT-89, or TO-252 pinout? This set of breakout PCBs will make your life much much easier and get you prototyping faster than ever.
This set comes with 3 different boards which fit 5 different packages and comes with five SOT-23 (fits 2 x SOT-23 on the back, and a single SOT-23-5 or SOT-23-6 on the front), four SOT-89 or SOT-223, and four TO-252. Each board has 0.1″ spaced holes. Solder your chip to either side and you’re ready to rock on any solderless breadboard.
NEW PRODUCT – SMT Breakout PCB for SOIC-8, MSOP-8 or TSSOP-8 – 6 Pack! – Beguiled by a fancy new chip that is only available in a SOIC or MSOP/(T)SSOP pinout? This breakout PCB set will make your life much much easier and get you prototyping faster than ever. One side has a 8-TSSOP/8-MSOP pin out with traces going to two rows of 0.1″ spaced holes, the other has 8-SOIC. Solder your chip to either side and you’re ready to rock on any solderless breadboard.
Each item comes with six PCBs, each PCB is identical and can support either a SOIC (narrow, medium or wide variety) or TSSOP. We made these on half-thickness PCBs, with 0.3″ spacing between the two rows.
NEW PRODUCT – SMT Breakout PCB for SOIC-16 or TSSOP-16 – 3 Pack! – Beguiled by a fancy new chip that is only available in a SOIC or (T)SSOP pinout? This breakout PCB set will make your life much much easier and get you prototyping faster than ever. One side has a 16-TSSOP pin out with traces going to two rows of 0.1″ spaced holes, the other has 16-SOIC. Solder your chip to either side and you’re ready to rock on any solderless breadboard.
Each item comes with three PCBs, each PCB is identical and can support either a SOIC (narrow, medium or wide variety) or TSSOP. Standard thickness PCBs, with 0.6″ spacing between the two rows. You can of course use a smaller chip but the pin numbering wont be right so use care.
The Adafruit Triple Axis Gyro Breakout is based on the STMicro L3GD20 MEMS digital output gyroscope chip. We include a 3.3v regulator on board for compatibility with 5v controllers like the Arduino. And there are 4 holes so that it can be rigidly mounted.
The triple-axis gyro sensor is a MEMS (Micro Electrical Mechanical System) device consisting of 3 micro-machined ‘tuning fork’ structures on a silicon wafer. These structures are designed to vibrate when stimulated by an electrical signal. When rotated about the axis of the tuning fork, the tines will deflect due to the Coriolis force. This deflection is proportional to the speed of rotation.
The 3 MEMS structures are arranged orthogonally, on the X, Y and Z axis. Deflection on each tuning fork is detected as a change in capacitance between sensing plates built into the MEMS structure and converted to a degrees-per-second rotation rate for each of the three axis.
NEW PRODUCT – INA169 Analog DC Current Sensor Breakout – 60V 5A Max. This breakout board will solve all your current-monitoring problems. Instead of struggling with a multimeter, you can just use the handy INA169 chip on this breakout to both measure both the DC current draw and have a handy analog output that is with respect to ground. The analog output makes this an ideal breakout for feedback-loop control.
Most current-measuring devices such as our current panel meter are only good for low side measuring. That means that unless you want to get a battery involved, you have to stick the measurement resistor between the target ground and true ground. This can cause problems with circuits since electronics tend to not like it when the ground references change and move with varying current draw. This chip is much smarter – it can handle high side current measuring, up to +60VDC!
A precision amplifier measures the voltage across the 0.1 ohm, 1% sense resistor. The resistor is rated for 2W continuous so you can measure up to +5A continuous. The output is a current that is drawn through the on-board 10K resistor so that the output voltage is 1V per Amp. So for 2A draw, the output will be 2V. You can change out the load resistor to be larger or smaller by cutting the traces next to it and soldering a thru hole resistor over. If you solder in a 20K resistor you’ll get 2V per Amp, with a 5K resistor, 0.5V per Amp.
We include a 6-pin header (so you can easily attach this sensor to a breadboard) as well as a 3.5mm terminal plug so you can easily attach and detach your load. Usage is simple. Power the sensor with 2.7-60V, and connect V+ to the high side of your power supply, then connect V- to your grounded load. Then use a multimeter to measure the voltage output, that’s it!
One side has a 44-QFP pin out with traces going to two rows of 0.1″ spaced holes, the other has 44-QFN. Solder your chip to either side and you’re ready to rock on any solderless breadboard.
Each item comes with three PCBs, each PCB is identical and can support either a 10mm square QFP or 7mm square QFN chip. Standard thickness PCBs, with 0.7″ spacing between the two rows.
NEW PRODUCT! SMT Breakout PCB for 32-QFN or 32-TQFP – 3 Pack! – One side has a 32-QFP pin out with traces going to two rows of 0.1″ spaced holes, the other has 32-QFN. Solder your chip to either side and you’re ready to rock on any solderless breadboard.
Each item comes with three PCBs, each PCB is identical and can support either a 7mm square QFP or 5mm square QFN chip. Standard thickness PCBs, with 0.6″ spacing between the two rows.
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)
The ADS1115 and ADS1015 4-channel breakout boards are prefect for adding high-resolution analog to digital conversion to any microprocessor-based project. These boards can run with power and logic signals between 2v to 5v, so they are compatible with all common 3.3v and 5v processors. As many of 4 of these boards can be controlled from the same 2-wire I2C bus, giving you up to 16 single-ended or 8 differential channels. A programmable gain amplifier provides up to x16 gain for small signals.
These two boards are very similar, differing only in resolution and speed. The ADS1115 has higher resolution and the ADS1015 has a higher sample rate.
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