MightyOhm has a sneak preview of his 2013 Maker Faire Bay Area project up on Flickr.

Detect particles and/or make a cool random number generator with this handsome Geiger counter kit. This easy-to-make pack of parts turns a simple Geiger-Muller tube (included) into a portable blink, beeping radiation detector. You can also connect an FTDI friend to the header, to get serial output for datalogging on your computer.

In Stock and Shipping Now!

pighixxx has posted a slide-rule template for Voltage, Resistance, Current, and Power calculations!

DIY Homebrew Kegerator Thermostat

Here’s a picture of a project I recently completed: a thermostat for controlling the temperature in a homebrew kegerator. I am using a small chest freezer which can hold two cornelius kegs and associated CO2 tank. I could have spent the $ to just buy a nice digital one, but I had some parts on hand and picked up a few parts from Adafruit and pieced it all together for much less.

Uses an Adafruit 0.56″ 4-Digit 7-Segment Display w/I2C Backpack and the DS18B20 Digital temperature sensor.

Peter modded this lampshade with one of our LED belt kits!

Digital programmable LED belt kit!

EL wire pinwheel by Scott Janousek:

The EL Pinwheel was a CUBICAL90 digital art project at Artisan’s Asylum by Scott Janousek. The project was inspired by Ecco Pierce who does metal sculpture and EL. The EL Pinwheel was created in the span of a few hours, in intervals, over the span of a week.

EL wire starter pack – Aqua 2.5 meter (8.2 ft)

Introducing WIF: the WyoLum Image Format

I love the new e-paper offered by Pervasive Displays and sold by Adafruit.  They are a bit tricky to get started with however.  By default, they only display images, no text or standard graphics calls like “line” and “circle” and each image takes a lot of memory.  Too much for a stand alone Arduino UNO.

Even if you have the memory, another tricky thing about them is getting an image to look good in pure black and white (no greys).

At WyoLum, we have tackled all of these problems and figured out how to display UNICODE chars, and draw graphics (lines and circles).  We’ve chosen to use an SD card as both a file source and a screen buffer.  It is working well.  Most of this is just in test code state, but we figure there are others out there struggling with the same issues and might find our solutions handy.

Ever since the Kindle eReader came out, we’ve been wanting a nice small graphical eInk display that is easy to use with a microcontroller. And finally our desires have been fulfilled with the rePaper 2.7″ development board from Pervasive Displays! We’re excited to offer this very interesting display breakout for hackers who want to start playing with small eInk displays.

In Stock and Shipping Now!

This is an Arduino porting of the excellent work by Markus Frejek.
The final aim is to create an economic component tester using Arduino and a few passive components;

You can see more about ArduTester in our Arduino Forum.

Allen writes:

For the compass rose, I stitched the Adafruit neopixels together and hooked them up to the Adafruit Flora. Also connected to the Flora is a magnetometer/accelerometer. The magnetometer probably gave me the most grief. It turns out that if you want to use communications protocols (like I2C) on e-textiles, make sure the connection is SOLID! I became so frustrated with the magnetometer not talking to the Flora that I just soldered some wires instead.

Despite the frustrations, I’m pretty happy with how the bag turned out. This was also the first time using the Flora and I have to say, I love it! I can certainly tell that the folks at Adafruit put A LOT of thought into it. One little detail that made me really happy was strategically placing the SDA, SCL, power and ground pads so that you wouldn’t have to have any thread/wires cross. If you’ve been working with e-textiles for a while, you’ll know exactly what I mean! Seriously, Adafruit…thank you!!!

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!

The PAN management box outside and inside

From the Adafruit Foru, uberhund writes:

The PANdora Box can send one of 16 messages selected by the brass knob connected to a rotary encoder in the center of the base section. The smoky plex allows the various parts within to be seen, aided by an LED strip light of variable color and intensity, and mirrors on the interior walls. Wacky button sounds are played by the Wav shield as the user rotates the brass knob through each message. Pressing the brass knob instructs an Arduino to send the selected Wav file name across the PAN to the remote listeners which then find and play the Wav file, with, or sometimes without, a preamble. The preamble can be selected from a list appropriate to the message, such as creaky doors, or impersonations. The message itself is usually something useful (but not always) like Kids, please take out the garbage.

Read More

The manic doorbell, on the left, and the snarky oven on the right with warning label “Caution. Oven can be somewhat condescending”

Fitbit Hack Night: Temperature Logging Project

Each month all San Francisco Fitbit employees are invited to join in a hack night project. This casual event is an opportunity for employees to tinker and participate in various fun projects. The first few hack nights focused on learning to solder using various kits from Adafruit and Sparkfun — some favorites were TV-B-Gone, MiniPOV and Electronic Dice. In another other hack night we added physical feedback to our automated build system. In the case of a failed build a robot voice speaks the engineer’s name and blinky lights are fired off.

Our most recent project was a pair of office thermometers that graph real-time temperature readings using an online data graphing service called Cosm. Indoor office temperature tends to fluctuate throughout the day. Many employees are quite vocal (even dramatic) about their temperature experience, “My blood is boiling, I’m a goner for sure” or “Brrrr, I can’t type, I’m shivering too much”. Temperatures In the mid 70s °F seem to please the most people most of the time.

To get a bit of objectivity on the temperature discussion we decided to provide a reference for each of our two San Francisco locations by having real-time temperature readings posted to a place everyone can see, a web page. If you’re interested in trying something like this yourself, just keep reading.

What is the electric imp? In essence, the Imp provides an easy, integrated way to connect almost any hardware device both to other devices and to internet services. It’s more than just a WiFi card, or even a WiFi module with processing built in – it’s an integrated platform that deals with the drudgery of connectivity, allowing you to concentrate on the application instead of the mechanics.

In Stock and Shipping Now!

Jonah Brucker-Cohen & Justin Blinder made StockBank as their entry to FutureAdvisor’s “build a better piggy bank” contest. Uses some Adafruit gear including our coin accepter, cool!

StockBank is a networked piggy bank with the end goal of collecting enough money to buy one share of the three technology stocks of Google, Apple, and Facebook. As someone drops a coin into the bank, the display shows the amount of the selected stock share price decreasing until it levels off at zero, which means that there is enough money inside the bank to buy one share. The bank then automatically connects to an online broker, purchases the share, and blinks the pig. When the bank is emptied, the counter resets back to another share price and begins the process over again.

The project exists as an open source, networked object that prompts users to stay connected to the current stock valuation of technology corporations and see how they change and fluctuate over time. It reinvents the classic piggy bank by instead of counting money for saving, it connects in real-time to actual stock prices and gives the user an estimate on the amount of money they need to purchase a share of the specified stock.

Coin Acceptor – Programmable 4 Coin Type – Your project may be free-as-in-speech, but that doesn’t mean it has to be free-as-in-beer. This handy coin validator/acceptor module is just like the ones you’ve seen in arcades. This model has the cool ability to accept up to 4 different coins! For example, you can program it for 4 different US coins, or European, or Japanese OR you can have it accept 4 coins from different countries – say a Chinese Yuan, Japanese Yen, American Quarter and European Euro. First you’ll have to program it with what coins you want it to accept. Any coin from 15mm to 29mm in diameter can be used. Each coin is assigned a number of pulses, so for example, a nickel should be 1 pulse, a dime, 2 pulses, a quarter 5 pulses and a half dollar 10 pulses. When a valid coin is inserted, the output line will pulse for 20-60ms (configurable). The acceptor looks for diameter, thickness, dropping speed, etc to determine if a coin is valid.

k6rtm tweets: “#Adafruit RGB #neopixels with photocell for sensing ambient light levels”

Flora RGB Smart Neo Pixel version 2 – Pack of 4 – What’s a wearable project without LEDs? Our favorite part of the Flora platform is these tiny smart pixels. Designed specifically for wearables, these updated Flora NeoPixels have ultra-cool technology: these ultra-bright LEDs have a constant-current driver cooked right into the LED package! The pixels are chainable – so you only need 1 pin/wire to control as many LEDs as you like. They’re easy to sew, and the chainable design means no crossed threads.

Bill Porter tweets “A sneak peek of what we wore at our wedding for @adafruit’s #WearableWednesday”

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!

Sound Effects Suit Jacket by Kenneth Guglielmino:

Inspired by sitcoms and cartoons. I thought it would be fun to be able to add sound effects to my own life. So I made a sound effects suit jacket. The sound samples are triggered by a control panel with 4 buttons (3 for samples, 1 for changing sound banks). And then being played from an Arduino + Wave Shield through a portable speaker. All the hardware is kept within the inner jacket pockets while in use.

Uses an Adafruit Wave Shield! Adding quality audio to an electronic project is surprisingly difficult. Here is a shield for Arduinos that solves this problem. It can play up to 22KHz, 12bit uncompressed audio files of any length. It’s low cost, available as an easy-to-make kit. It has an onboard DAC, filter and op-amp for high quality output. Audio files are read off of an SD/MMC card, which are available at nearly any store. Volume can be controlled with the onboard thumbwheel potentiometer.

TARDIS IKEA SHOPPING BAG.

Yes, it is bigger on the inside.

You would not believe how much Fn stuff you can put inside one of these things Although, it’s fun to hang out at the customer loading area to see how people will try to jam a couch into the backseat of a convertible and drive it home.

Made of a nearly indestructible woven polypropylene fabric, this reusable tote is totally awesomesauce amazeballs. And in a pinch, can transport you through time and space.

And once you schlep your stuff to your homeworld, fend off a few Daleks, you can put your things away in the TARDIS bookcase cupboard.

It has handy side pouches for storage of small items like keys and lights up as if it were ready to dematerialise.

DISCLAIMER: The TARDDYS BJAG is a modification of an actual IKEA product. You will not find it in their stores or in the catalog. Don’t ask. Well, maybe at the Torchwood Soho branch store.

Crazy faun-leg stilts adorned with Adafruit addressable pixels! Photo enhanced by the presence of cats, of course.

12mm Diffused Flat Digital RGB LED Pixels (Strand of 25) – WS2801 - RGB Pixels are digitally-controllable lights you can set to any color, or animate. Each RGB LED and controller chip is molded into a ‘dot’ of silicone. The dots are weatherproof and rugged. There are four flanges molded in so that you can ‘push’ them into a 12mm drill hole in any material up to 1.5mm/0.06″ thick. They’re typically used to make outdoor signs. These pixels have a flat square back,we also have pixels that are long and thin, both are the same electronics, just different shapes!

Steve Teeri writes: “Made wearable electronics with @adafruit Flora, NeoPixels, and conductive steel thread.”

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!

Vines are so lovely, I wish I could embed them. Shimo made one depicting conductive fabric as a capacitive sensor, lighting up a Flora NeoPixel.

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!

Martin Bircher posted this rad photo of his installation Memento Mori:

The Memento Mori installation consists of a 4 digit LED display, which is mounted between the teeth of a casted human skull and connected to a highly accurate rubidium atomic clock. The display visualizes the passage of time by repeatedly counting down one second in millisecond-steps (from 1.000 to .001).

By utilizing atomic clocks, we can determine with unimaginable accuracy how quickly the irretrievable essence of our lives is decreasing, how fast the ultimate yet unknown point in time of our death is approaching – millisecond by millisecond. This Memento Mori is not only an ironic reminder of our own mortality but a reflection of the values we are striving for. Despite all the hyper-accurate technology inhabiting our lives the haunting question of “When?” still remains unanswered.

Want to be featured on Flickr pool Friday? Add your Adafruits to the Adafruit Flickr pool.

ABC starts with the simple:

Moves on to the cool

And even takes you where you really don’t want to go:
 pighixxx has posted the first 13 of 20 planned ABC cards here!

I Heart Robotics posted a build log for their custom Arduino powered RFID door lock system.

Often times an office finds the struggle of granting access to rooms without jeopardizing physical copies of keys. These struggles can be easily overcome with technologies such as facial recognition, finger print recognition, bar codes, radio frequency identification, and much more.

Here at I Heart Engineering, we felt the need to have awesome badges fit our daily attire, where we can have both style and access to our offices without the need of weighty keys by building a robot door.

Using the Arduino Ethernet along with Adafruit’s PN-532 RFID/NFC Breakout Board, the badges were a mere grasp away from reality.

The PN532 is the most popular NFC chip, and is what is embedded in pretty much every phone or device that does NFC. It can pretty much do it all, such as read and write to tags and cards, communicate with phones (say for payment processing), and ‘act’ like a NFC tag. If you want to do any sort of embedded NFC work, this is the chip you’ll want to use!

In Stock and Shipping Now!

Beth aka scanlime built this LED matrix with our NeoPixel strip!

Adafruit NeoPixel Digital RGB LED Weatherproof Strip 60 LED – 1m – You thought it couldn’t get better than our world-famous 32-LED-per-meter Digital LED strip but we will prove you wrong! You wanted twice the LEDs? We got it (well, its 1.875 times as many but that’s within a margin of error). You wanted thinner strips? Now only 12.5 mm wide, 10 mm if you remove the strip from the casing. You wanted less noticable strip color – this strip has white-colored flex PCB, which will be less visible against white-painted walls. 

Jenna writes:

I remade my fox ears for Neko Nation yesterday and put heaps of LEDs in them! They can do rainbows!

Laithorn asked if I’d put up schematics for my LED fox ears. Here goes! It’s a bunch of Adafruit Flora Pixels hot glued to a black plastic headband I found in a dollar shop. I wired them directly up to a Digispark (tiny arduino thing) which is powered from a 9v battery in my pocket. Flora Pixels need only one data wire, so you can power them through regular stereo audio cables which are strong, plentiful, comfortable and asthetic, and you can use audio splitters to hook multiple things up in parallel.

Flora RGB Smart Neo Pixel version 2 – Pack of 4 – What’s a wearable project without LEDs? Our favorite part of the Flora platform is these tiny smart pixels. Designed specifically for wearables, these updated Flora NeoPixels have ultra-cool technology: these ultra-bright LEDs have a constant-current driver cooked right into the LED package! The pixels are chainable – so you only need 1 pin/wire to control as many LEDs as you like. They’re easy to sew, and the chainable design means no crossed threads.

caitlinsdad writes:

Awww, You make me blush. Wouldn’t it be cool to animate your Adafruit Circuit Playground electronic component plushie? I have Ruby the Red LED plushie. I wanted it to light up and have it respond to sound.  Here  is an easy mod to get that done. Sorry, no lasers this time.

Probably wouldn’t really be considered old-school soft circuits but probably more of a hybrid, electronics in a softshell case. I still have a bobbin of conductive thread I need to do something with. Note that this was a first attempt  in trying to do a mod with stuff I had on hand but I will offer suggestions on what you should do to get a more satisfactory result.

Ruby’s partner in crime Mho the Resistor plushie has been modded as an analog resistor value decoder.

8-bit Annoying Person Remover via Hackaday:

Still trying to solidify that reputation as the office Grinch? This project will let everyone know you’re a complete jerk in no time. It’s called the 8-bit Annoying Person Remover. It detects when someone enters your office at which point it starts to play the Super Mario Bros. theme song while the display counts down 400 seconds. Just like in the game the music gets faster at the end and when it stops they know it’s time to get the heck out.

The hardware inside isn’t too complicated. An Arduino and a Wave shield do most of the work. The song played is stored on an SD card and can easily be changed. There’s a speaker mounted under the top heat vent of the enclosure. The device defaults to displaying the time of day, but monitors a motion sensor on one side to detect when someone comes through the door. This also works when someone leaves, cutting off the music and resetting the display.

Joshua Warchol posted up this rad LED Ampli-Tie on Twitter/Vine, awesome Flora project!

Make your own VU meter necktie with our LED Ampli-Tie tutorial!

From Twitter: Adafruit Class-D Amp Powered iPod Speaker System.  Pick up an Adafruit Stereo 3.7W Class D Audio Amplifier here!

Check out this neat lights out game project by Anthony DiGirolamo.  Not only did he create a great project with a nice enclosure, he shared every bit of the project with us.

Over the past year I’ve been working on my first big hardware project. It started as an experiment in powering and controlling led displays. I love the blinky lights and wanted something big that would catch the eye.

The end result is a tabletop sized arcade for a 4×4 lights out game similar in gameplay to the Mini Lights out Game by Tiger Electronics.

…

This project took me a long while to complete due to lack of free time. I began when my son turned one year old and finished not long before he turned two. The effort paid off though and I’m happy with how it turned out.

Learn more about the project here.

RGB Pixels are digitally-controllable lights you can set to any color, or animate. Each RGB LED and controller chip is molded into a ‘dot’ of silicone. The dots are weatherproof and rugged. There are four flanges molded in so that you can ‘push’ them into a 12mm drill hole in any material up to 1.5mm/0.06″ thick. They’re typically used to make outdoor signs. We also have flat-backed pixels that are essentially the same, but are not as long and thin.

In Stock and Shipping Now!

Build your own open-source Arduino powered colorimeter, complete with 3D printed enclosure and an Adafruit LCD Shield kit.

This project details an open-source colorimeter, which is made from open source electronics and 3-D printable components. This is part of a larger project to reduce the cost of scientific equipment using open-source hardware.

Colorimetric analytical methods are likely to be the most commonly applied methods for determining the concentration of dissolved species. Many dissolved species absorb light of a particular wavelength and the amount absorbed as the light passes through a given length of solution increases with increasing concentration the species; higher concentrations absorb more light than do lower concentrations. The relationship between absorption and concentration is defined by the Beer-Lambert law:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer-Lambert.

A colorimeter or a spectrophotometer is employed to measure absorption at a specific wavelength. Light is usually filtered to permit only a narrow band of light at the absorbance peak wavelength for the species measured. The apparatus typically reports results in concentration units but also reports absorbance units or transmittance.

Read more about the project here.

This new Adafruit shield makes it easy to use a 16×2 Character LCD. We really like the Blue & White 16×2 LCDs we stock in the shop. Unfortunately, these LCDs do require quite a few digital pins, 6 to control the LCD and then another pin to control the backlight for a total of 7 pins. That’s almost half of the pins available on a classic Arduino! With this in mind, we wanted to make it easier for people to get these LCD into their projects so we devised a shield that lets you control a 16×2 Character LCD, up to 3 backlight pins AND 5 keypad pins using only the two I2C pins on the Arduino!

Get your own Adafruit LCD Shield Kit here.

Paul Martis writes in:

I wanted to share my Valentine’s Day project with you. I called it a Valentine Love Light and it’s a gift I made for my wife incorporating an animated LED message along with a light bulb which has the filament replaced with an EL-wire heart. By the way, your tutorials for EL wire are really helpful – the use of copper tape makes working with it so much easier!

Trammell Hudson writes in about the TIMESQUARE watch class he held at NYC Resistor:

We had a great class yesterday. Four of the students had never soldered before, but the kits went together really easily and all eight worked on the first try.  We took a little longer on the assembly than I had expected — 2.5 hours instead of 1.5 — and as a result the software portion was a little bit shorter than I had planned.  Everyone successfully compiled and re-flashed their watches using the arduino IDE and the FTDI friend, so they should be in good shape for experimenting with them.

TIMESQUARE DIY Watch Kit in five colors!

JP Reardon wrote in to share about his Pomodoro Timer project

Pomodoro Timer

This is a very simple Arduino shield with only one purpose: to Serve as a timer for practicing the Pomodoro Technique®. If you’ve never heard of this technique, you might want to have a quick peak at their site before reading on.What follows is fairly long winded. If you’re not all that interested in the process, and just want some links to the Arduino sketch, schematics and board layout, skip to resources section at the end.

Background

I wanted very simple project that could be completed in a short amount of time and I wanted it to be useful. Since I am sometimes prone to fits of procrastination, I am familiar with the Pomodoro Technique® and find it to be a good way to help get things done. In my environment, the prescribed tomato kitchen timer is too noisy. So, a specialized pomodoro timer to use at work makes for a great, simple project.

Learn More

Frans Goddijn used an Adafruit RGB LCD Arduino Shield and a MAX31855 Thermocouple Amplifier to monitor the temperature of his espresso machine.

How nice that Adafruit prints some basic info on the back side of the stamp-sized MAX31855. I first soldered on the blue unit that takes the K-type temperature probe. Next, the comb of pins that will have 5V and ground and the other connections with the Arduino board: one line for the Arduino to beat the time for all activity on our little blue island, one for the Arduino board to tell MAX when to check the temperature probe and report what it says and one data line to hand in the reports to Arduino.

Wired up, time to hook it up. The probe strapped to the hot brew group of the Ponte Vecchio Lusso 2 espresso machine. The circuit reports room temperature (well it’s actually the internal temperature of the chip living on the blue MAX island but over there it’s about as warm as it is here) and the temp on the tip of the probe. Next, I could send it over to the laptop using a network connection, or save a lot of data on a memory chip to analyze on the computer later and turn into graphics, noticing any dips and spikes during espresso making or trends along the day, warmup and cooling wave forms.

Pick up the Adafruit RGB LCD Arduino Shield Kit here, and the Thermocouple Amplifier MAX31855 breakout board here.

Neat idea by @adam_casto, combine the Adafruit Mini Voltmeter and Adjustable Breadboard Power Supply.

Combined @adafruit mini voltmeter & adjustable breadboard power supply for nice little desk setup.

Pick up the Adafruit Mini Voltmeter here, and the Adafruit Adjustable Breadboard Power Supply here.

Jay put together a nice little video of a GPS clock he built using an Arduino Micro, an Adafruit Ultimate GPS module, and an Adafruit 4-Digit 7-Segment LED Display.

I’ve posted a new video of the small GPS clock project I have been working on this past week.  It’s pretty easy to do, and only needs soldering on the GPS and LED units.  You can mount everything to a breadboard, so you don’t need to commit the parts to the project permanently.

Learn More

We carry a few different GPS modules here in the Adafruit shop, but none that satisfied our every desire – that’s why we designed this little GPS breakout board. We believe this is the Ultimate GPS module, so we named it that. It’s got everything you want and more!

In Stock and Shipping Now!

Jim Lynch writes in:

In Becky’s video about the Adafruit Menta, she challenged customers to send in their applications of the Menta.

Not wanting to let her down, I just completed the design and construction of an ECG simulator (creates that famous heart waveform signal you see on all the medical shows).

As an ardent supporter of Open Source, I documented the design with an 87 page tutorial on GitHub, including all the drawings and software created for the project.

If you take the time to download the tutorial (pdf), you’ll see that it’s a very nice example of applying the Adafruit Menta.

Adafruit MENTA – Mint Tin Arduino Compatible Kit with Mint Tin

Last week on Electronics Show and Tell we had another visit from the talented Guillermo Amaral who shared with us custom NES controller board he had put together using a bunch of Adafruit components. While this controller is in fact for a NES system, we were excited to hear that this is also part of his ongoing project to use a Raspberry Pi to record NES gameplay, potentially to save and then playback on the NES or a NES emulator. Visit his site to see lots of photos and details from the project in progress!

I recently found myself with a surplus of Adafruit Industries components, I decided to put a few of them to good use by making a custom NES controller.

Objectives

• Use a thru-hole 5-way navigation switch.
• Use some square tactile buttons.
• Create a custom Eagle device for the navigation switch.
• Use a strip of SMD 0603 10k resistors.
• Use a single-sided 65×65 MM square board (since I have a bunch of them).

Design

The design is fairly simple, the only difference between it and a standard controller would be the use of the Center pin on the navigation switch as the Select button….

Read more.

SHOW AND TELL 1/12/2013 (video).

Adafruit Forums member JD3 has posted up his custom Arduino shield project.  It is an Arduino shield that holds an Adafruit MicroSD breakout board and an Adafruit accelerometer breakout board for some data logging fun.

I am thinking about producing one of my prototypes, the Adafruit Sensor Shield. It allows the easy integration of Adafruit’s MicroSD breakout board and one of their accelerometer breakout boards to their Arduino. If enough people are interested I would start a project on Tindie or Kickstarter. I’m thinking a PCB only price of $6-$10, depending on how many are interested, PCB manufacturer, etc.

The final design has the traces re routed to remove all the right angles, ground plain added, moved the TMP36 to shorten traces, etc. The new boards are being manufactured and I will post the pics when I get them, should be in a week or two.

Learn more about the project on the Adafruit Forums.

Mike Barela posted up a new game using the Arduino Esplora and the Adafruit 1.8″ TFT LCD Display.

Ok, the Arduino Esplora has been out about 3 weeks.  It’s time we had some cool software for it and what better than a fun game.  Today I publish a game for running on the Esplora with an Adafruit 1.8″ display.

…

I was looking for a game that was more than the basics to show off the Esplora + Display combo.  I found R0D0T’s code and with accelerometer, music, and display, it was a great match.  As I use the Arduino IDE, I merged the code, changed the display library to Adafruit’s, and recreated a couple library routines that R0D0T had used but had no Adafruit equivalent.  Then I had to map the buttons (which required Esplora library calls), and the accelerometer (which I originally used hardware but changed over to library calls).  I mapped the SPI interface to the display and it worked!  Some small tweeks to color and alignment but it is basically still R0D0T’s original (a tribute to his ninja-coding).

I strapped a 5V battery to it for portability.  You can use USB power (keep a loose cord as you will be flicking your wrist).  Orient the Esplora with the joystick at top and buttons below.  Then the right button (top in landscape mode) is the “bonus effects” on button.  The bonus effects are Jet Pack, Frog Legs, Testosterone, and Low gravity.  After turning bonus on via the button, you strike a colored platform to get the bonus to activate.

Learn more and get the code here.

This lovely little display breakout is the best way to add a small, colorful and bright display to any project. Since the display uses 4-wire SPI to communicate and has its own pixel-addressable frame buffer, it can be used with every kind of microcontroller. Even a very small one with low memory and few pins available!

In Stock and Shipping Now!

Great interactive puppet project shared on the Adafruit Forums by dpoakley, who contributed to Jared Axelrod’s Captain Chubbs project:

Hi, I had attended a Show and Tell last June with a MENTA and GLCD project I put together for a friend’s puppet. Here’s a picture after Jared has everything installed.

It was completed late last summer, but it’s never to late to post a project right? There are more pictures of the puppet, Captain Chubbs, over at my friend’s blog.

Read more.

Dave Pentecost got his Adafruit 1.8″ TFT LCD working with his Arduino Esplora. He then posted his findings over on the Makers, Hackers, Artists & Engineers Google+ Community.

I got my 1.8″ TFT LCD today, and after some fiddling with pin assignments it is working on the Esplora with the Adafruit libraries and the graphics test sketch.

Here is the change you have to make in the setup of the sketch:

#define sclk 15
#define mosi 16
#define cs   7
#define dc   0
#define rst  1

This lovely little display breakout is the best way to add a small, colorful and bright display to any project. Since the display uses 4-wire SPI to communicate and has its own pixel-addressable frame buffer, it can be used with every kind of microcontroller. Even a very small one with low memory and few pins available!

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uhclem on Instructables writes:

Have you ever seen a pocket calculator from the 1970s? If you have, you know that many used a series of tiny, red, LED seven-segment displays. These displays used little “bars” of light-emitting material which were placed behind little magnifying bubbles to make them more readily visible. They were very crisp and readable, and used a lot less power than vacuum fluorescent displays (VFD), which were also in use at that time.

I recall the little LED bubble displays were at one time in all sorts of handheld electronics and, in a slightly different form, watches. By the time LCDs became cheap in the late 1970′s, the more power-hungry LED display was on its way out.

I was pleasantly surprised back in 2011 to find on ebay a seller with numerous rails of HP 5082-7433 LED displays. These are three-digit displays in a 12-pin standard DIP format. I bought a few rails since the price was good. I’ve a tendency to get “stuff” and then never get around to using it so I decided this time there would be a project to make use of all the displays.

The “Tnychron” clock was born!

We spotted a DC Boarduino in the prototype!

Over at the Mechatronics Guy, there is a writeup about using Adafruit LPD8806 RGB LED light strips with a cheap RC aircraft.  Check out the neat results.

We modified a cheap ‘bixler‘ remote control aircraft. This is readily available, can be driven like a glider or under constant power, and has plenty of room to mount extras like FPV gear or electronics. It’s also very forgiving in crashes, as you can probably tell from the tape at the front.

The LED strip is LPD8806 based, and can be found here. I’d highly recommend checking out the awesome tutorials Adafruit put up on the web showing you how to use it. I used a standard arduino, and the code is at the bottom of the page.

Pick up a Digital RGB LED Weatherproof Strip here.

Garrett Mace writes:

I made this for New Year’s Eve. It has 114 RGB pixels and an MSGEQ7 chip to analyze audio. The pixels are all turned down to 51 max brightness (out of 255). I used an Arduino to control the pixels in one continuous chain, and a USB battery pack for power.

Adafruit NeoPixel Digital RGB LED Weatherproof Strip 60 LED -1m – You thought it couldn’t get better than our world-famous 32-LED-per-meter Digital LED strip but we will prove you wrong! You wanted twice the LEDs? We got it (well, its 1.875 times as many but that’s within a margin of error). You wanted thinner strips? Now only 12.5 mm wide, 10 mm if you remove the strip from the casing. You wanted less noticable strip color – this strip has white-colored flex PCB, which will be less visible against white-painted walls.

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!

Samantha Moore writes:

I am a huge fan of entomology displays, and wanted to create one that is interactive. When the copper tape on the surface of the frame is touched, the butterflies illuminate through a capacitive touch sensor. The blank white strip of paper to the side of each butterfly shows the name, scientific and common, for a bit of unexpected learning.

I created a box frame that is deep enough to house the paper butterflies along with the Arduino and breadboard. I would liked to have made a larger version with a ton of insects but three ended up being a challenge in itself.

Copper Foil Tape wth Conductive Adhesive – 25mm x 15 meter roll

Earlier this week, a curious video was shared in the Adafruit Google+ Community by Robert Hart featuring an intriguing flicker of lights. Following Robert’s link, it was an 81 Pixel Hodoscope, an instrument for detecting cosmic rays (muons)!

Here’s a video (on YouTube, on Vimeo) discovering Robert’s project at the Adafruit Google+ Community (over 30,000 members!) — all filled with exciting projects appearing there every single day. We’re looking forward to seeing what’s next, join up now!

Music by Adafruit’s very own Tom (Bartlebeats).

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Tubular Glow – Control an LED Light Strip with Javascript

Adafruit’s Digital Addressable LED Strips are quite versatile – they’re flexible, capable of displaying 2 million colors per pixel, and their LEDs can be controlled individually – allowing for countless project possibilities.

In this tutorial, we’ve inserted the strips into a clear plastic tube to create a thin column of LED lights, and then connect them to JavaScript GUI sliders through Spacebrew.

The LED tube could be used as one “bar” of a digitally controlled bar graph installation, as part of a sculptural feature, or – my favorite – a makeshift light saber. Follow the steps below to make your own!

These LED strips are fun and glowy. There are 32 RGB LEDs per meter, and you can control each LED individually! Yes, that’s right, this is the digitally-addressable type of LED strip. You can set the color of each LED’s red, green and blue component with 7-bit PWM precision (so 21-bit color per pixel). The LEDs are controlled by shift-registers that are chained up down the strip so you can shorten or lengthen the strip. Only 2 digital output pins are required to send data down. The PWM is built into each chip so once you set the color you can stop talking to the strip and it will continue to PWM all the LEDs for you.

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We have seen plenty of LED Christmas trees this year, but this one is a bit unique.  Instead of wrapping LEDs around a tree (or in the shape of a tree), Andrew cut a tree shape out of MDF, and filled it with Adafruit LED Pixels.

I imagine I’ll be adding to the animations over the holidays and will hopefully get some video of the tree in action.  In the meantime it’ll be accompanying me on my holiday traveling and visiting.

I’m happy w/ the crafty look of the tree as it reminds me of a wooden tree my mom made for me some years back with traditional incandescent string lights.  Next year I’ll start work earlier on some fancy laser-cut versions

RGB Pixels are digitally-controllable lights you can set to any color, or animate. Each RGB LED and controller chip is molded into a ‘dot’ of silicone. The dots are weatherproof and rugged. There are four flanges molded in so that you can ‘push’ them into a 12mm drill hole in any material up to 1.5mm/0.06″ thick. They’re typically used to make outdoor signs. We also have flat-backed pixels that are essentially the same, but are not as long and thin.

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Margery at Designing With LEDs took a cheap big box store small spiral LED Christmast tree, and added an addressable RGB LED light strip to it.

I got a 5-meter reel of individually-controllable RBG LEDs for my birthday this year. Their light is gorgeous, especially the super-saturated blues and greens. But other than stringing them up around the office I haven’t done much with them. Christmas LED project time!

These LED strips are fun and glowy. There are 32 RGB LEDs per meter, and you can control each LED individually! Yes, that’s right, this is the digitally-addressable type of LED strip. You can set the color of each LED’s red, green and blue component with 7-bit PWM precision (so 21-bit color per pixel). The LEDs are controlled by shift-registers that are chained up down the strip so you can shorten or lengthen the strip. Only 2 digital output pins are required to send data down. The PWM is built into each chip so once you set the color you can stop talking to the strip and it will continue to PWM all the LEDs for you.

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From the Adafruit Forums: Learning with a MENTA

Yay, assembled a MENTA and ordered me an FTDI friend, along with a digital temp sender a 1.8 tft display and some various stuff.
Love this thing, I have it up and running ( from Linux and Windows XP ) and have run the example codes and the adafruit LCD graphics examples.

Managed to cut and paste my way into running the thermometer and the LCD at the same time and now have a really clunky digital thermometer. Even played with display size and rotation.

Loving the ease of access to this platform and dearly love the MENTA, Thank you Ladyada et all for the wonderful products and tutorials.
About to spring for a couple boarduino’s I think so I can keep my menta for playing with and dedicate a few to working projects.

Introducing the MENTA, a portable minty Arduino-compatible project that fits into a common mint tin. We took our super popular Boarduino series, and wrapped it with a prototyping area into a rounded PCB that slots directly into an Altoids-sized metal tin.

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