WyoLum EReader Library.

If you have an E-Paper Display form Adafruit, this library will allow you to draw points, lines, circles, ellipses, ASCII text and Unicode text.  Oh, and display images (in the WyoLum Image Format).  Please consider this an alpha release and help us find the bugs.

Adafruit eInk displays in stock and shipping!

NEW PRODUCT – BlinkStick – Smart USB-Controlled LED Pixel Kit – This mini kit is an easy way to add a single RGB-color LED to your computer. After assembly (requires a soldering iron, solder and diagonal cutter – not included) plug it into you Mac, Windows or Linux computer’s USB port and run the open source software to control the bright LED’s color. No drivers required!

While there are a few USB-pixel controllers out there, we like this one for its comprehensive software & examples for popular operating systems. There’s also some code written that allows use of the blinkstick through a web-browser, using BlinkStick.com as an event-provider!

This pack contains all parts required to build one BlinkStick. It’s designed to be small (the size of an average USB Flash key), but still easy to solder even for beginners. The kit comes with a preprogrammed ATTiny85 chip with the latest BlinkStick firmware.

For tons more info, including project ideas, firmware and schematic files, instructions, etc check out blinkstick.com

In stock and shipping now!

Check out Pedro J. Arroyo’s ‘LED belt on steroids’ project video. Double-wide LED belt kit with Arduino Esplora. Shared on the Adafruit Forums!

Finally got some spare time to put this together and I got it to work like a charm. Got the sample code to run 64 LEDs. So Stoked! Now I just need to figure out how to address the LEDs with the Esploras varied sensors.

Thanks for the help, and for providing such neat things to tinker with!

Read more.

NEW PRODUCT – PIXEL Guts Kit – Bluetooth Controlled 32×32 RGB LED Matrix Kit (new video!). Control a 32×32 LED matrix with your Android device or PC over Bluetooth, no soldering or coding required! This is a 32×32 (1024 total) LED RGB matrix connected to a custom IOIO Mint so that custom graphics can be sent from any Android device to the display. Originally designed for a kickstarter, now the ‘guts’ of the PIXEL project are available for pixelated graphics fans who want to create their own custom enclosure.

Comes with dozens of fun animations. Or easily create and add your own. Comes with a 32×32 LED Matrix, IOIO Mint with custom ‘shield’, 5V 4A power adapter (US plug but can take 100-240VAC input), a Bluetooth module for the IOIO and a Bluetooth module for your PC (in case it doesn’t have one), and necessary cabling. Android tablet/phone not included. You’ll need to have your own Android device for controlling the PIXEL kit.

In stock and shipping!

Tutorial: Character LCD System Monitor @ Adafruit Learning System

This guide walks through the process of assembling and configuring our LCD displays with USB/serial backpack and stand as a realtime system monitor. These displays are great for monitoring the health and status of “headless” systems such as servers, small Raspberry Pi installations, or as an auxiliary information display on your regular computer. You can get one of our cute acrylic stands in the Adafruit shop.

Learn more!

NEW PRODUCT – Acrylic Stand for 16×2 Character LCD. Here is a mini-kit to get your 16×2 LCD standing up straight on your table. Made of 3mm black acrylic pieces, with 4 x 1″ nylon screws & 4 x nylon hex nuts, it goes together in a jiffy and looks super-spiffy!

Designed specifically for our 16×2 USB/Serial backpacks, but will work with nearly any 16×2 character LCD setup.

Character LCD not included! but we have lots in the shop to choose from!

In stock and shipping now.

Featured Adafruit Products

NTSC/PAL (Television) TFT Display – 2.0″ Diagonal – Yes, this is an adorable miniature television! The visible display measures only 2.0″ diagonal, the TFT comes with a NTSC/PAL driver board. The display is very easy to use – simply connect 6-15VDC to the red and black wires, then connect a composite video source to the yellow and black wire. Voila, a television display! There’s a little button to adjust the LED backlight brightness (5 levels) – there is no other adjustment available but we found that the color and contrast look great right out of the box.

To demonstrate it, we took some photos with the display connected to a Raspberry Pi, but it will also work connected to any analog composite-video output such as a YBox or Propeller w/Video out. It will not work with a device that only outputs VGA, HDMI or any other digital video signal.

Please note, these miniature displays are very delicate and require care to avoid ripping the delicate flex connector. These are best used by electronics geeks who have experience and are comfortable working with delicate electronic components. WE CANNOT REPLACE DAMAGED DISPLAYS if you are not careful and rip the flex connector! (read more)

NEW PRODUCT – PIXEL Guts Kit – Bluetooth Controlled 32×32 RGB LED Matrix Kit – Control a 32×32 LED matrix with your Android device or PC over Bluetooth, no soldering or coding required! This is a 32×32 (1024 total) LED RGB matrix connected to a custom IOIO Mint so that custom graphics can be sent from any Android device to the display. Originally designed for a kickstarter, now the ‘guts’ of the PIXEL project are available for pixelated graphics fans who want to create their own custom enclosure.

Comes with dozens of fun animations. Or easy create and add your own. Comes with a 32×32 LED Matrix, IOIO Mint with custom ‘shield’, 5V 4A power adapter (US plug but can take 100-240VAC input), Bluetooth module for the IOIO, and necessary cabling. Android tablet/phone not included. You’ll need to have your own Android device for controlling the PIXEL kit.

Technical Details:

• Pixel Plate Dimensions: 190.5mm / 7.5″ x 190.5mm / 7.5″ x 15.87mm / 0.62″

In stock and shipping now!

#ROBO1010 upgrade #1 #NeoPixels from @adafruit for the eyes… seriously bright! twitter.com/rwinscot/statu…

— Rick Winscot (@rwinscot) May 8, 2013

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.

In Stock and Shipping Now!

J4MES posted in the forums:

Thanks to Adafruit for getting me started with Arduino and WS2801 LEDs,

Though my laptop got stolen before the event,

My installation Geodesic! was at it’s first music and arts festival, Lucidity!

Read more:

Over the past couple of weeks, Adafruit staffers Tony Sherwood and I carved out some of our free time to put together a “A Red Bull Creation 2013 Qualifier Entry” working from the fun LED strips and “turbull encabulator” shield the Red Bull Creation team had sent us to play around with.

Our goal from early on was to create something cute and actually engaging to play with that we could eventually give back to the Adafruit community. We seized on the idea of an RGB color picker, the “Koloric Konfabulator” and then featured “Ladyada’s E is for Electronics” — Adafruit awesome Creative Commons coloring book — as the material for participants to color. Check out our video showing how it works!

Koloric Konfabulator by The Difference Engines

• created by tony sherwood and matt griffin
• special thanks to michael curry, peter yee, leia & alex, risa, and adafruit
• knob design by michael curry
• music by bartlebeats

To learn more about ladyada’s “e is for electronics” coloring book, shared under Creative Commons, visit here: http://adafruit.com/coloringbook

Read more.

Featured Adafruit Project!

Ladyada’s “E is for Electronics”: Ladyada’s “E is for Electronics” is a coloring book adventure with electronic components and their inventors. Makers of all ages can learn, color, and share common parts and historical figures throughout history. Explore the world of electronics with Ladyada as your guide! (read more)

Tutorial: 1.8″ TFT Display Breakout and Shield @ The Adafruit Learning System.

This tutorial is for our 1.8″ diagonal TFT display. It comes packaged as a breakout or as an Arduino shield. Both styles have a microSD interface for storing files and images. These are both great ways 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 requires little memory and only a few pins. This makes it ideal for use with small microcontrollers.

The shield version plugs directly into an Arduino with no wiring required. The breakout version can be used with every kind of microcontroller.

Learn more.

TARDIS control room dress via Fashionably Geek

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!

NEW PRODUCTS – rePaper – 1.44″ and 2.7″ Graphic eInk Development Boards – 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 1.44″ and 2.7″ development boards from Pervasive Displays! We’re excited to offer these very interesting display breakouts for hackers who want to start playing with small eInk displays.

These kits come with a driver board that is powered from 3V and has level shifting on all the I/O pins so it can be used with 5V microcontrollers such as the Arduino. The PCB also has a lot of driver circuitry required to keep the display running smoothly such a temperature sensor, FLASH memory and ZIF socket. All signals are broken out to a 20 male socket header on the left. A 20 pin socket/socket cable is included to make wiring easier and there’s also some extra-long header so you can plug these wires into Arduino header or a breadboard.

The displays are 2.7″ diagonal with 264 x 176 resolution and 1.44″ diagonal and 128 x 96 resolution, true eInk graphical display. These are intended for use as small dynamic signage in grocery stores since a barcode displayed on it can be scanned by a laser barcode-reader. The displays do not require any power to keep the image and will stay ‘on’ without any power connection for many days before slowly fading. Of course, they’re also daylight readable and are very high contrast. This makes them excellent for data-logging applications, outdoor displays, or any other ultra-low power usages.

The good news is that rePaper/PDI have provided a suite of example code for Arduino UNO/Leonardo as well as the MSP430 Launchpad and also have a site with some documentation on how to wire up the displays and datasheets. However, please note: the displays are quite large pixel-wise and to dynamically write to the display requires 3K of RAM – more than the Arduino Uno or Leo/Launchpad so for those boards, the example code only displays what is stored in a 8-pin FLASH chip in the devboard. (By default that FLASH contains a picture of a cat and some imaged text, see photos above).

If you want to draw ‘dynamically’ (lines, circles, text, etc) you will need an Arduino Mega (Due not tested at this time. Check our tutorial for information on how to wire to a Mega so that you can use the Adafruit GFX library for drawing.

Technical Details for rePaper – 1.44″ Graphic eInk Development Board

Technical Details for rePaper – 2.7″ Graphic eInk Development Board

In stock and shipping now!

Great LED strip bike mod by Alex Glowaski

Use our tutorial and light up your ride with some LED handlebars!

Composed from a 1.1 meter diameter balloon, ‘fluff’, the interactive lighting system by japanese design studio tangent is a floating luminous body that creates dramatic spatial environments. the installation changes the color and rhythm of its light according to sound and video screens. With the concept, the lucent bodies lift from the walls like floating particles of air, emitting an illuminating presence from inside the space. The surroundings are filled with light instead of rather than being lit up from the surface – achieving a new experience that immerses the user into visual choreography.

Internal LED react to music and video internally, creating glowing orbs that seem to dance to the music around them:

LED rave shades kits and tutorial via Hacked Gadgets

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!

Building an Arduino powered Tardis-Light:

Background:

A friend of mine, Alex, is building his own Tardis, and needed a hand with the light on top. I cobbled this together in a couple of hours and thought I’d share it.

Source code and more here!

Featured Adafruit Products

Digital RGB LED Weatherproof Strip 32 LED – (1m) – 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. (read more)

On the most recent Adafruit Show-and-Tell, Will Garrido shared more about his LED Matrix Link breakout and project that he has been working steadily on for some months in preparation for his upcoming wedding. (We have covered a few of his previous stories about this work-in-progress!) At this stage he is zeroing in on a working setup at his blog, MobileWill. And make sure to check out the updates to his post, including his discovery of an app for Android to act as a SMS to Twitter gateway for those who don’t have Twitter, a very useful find.

The main driving force to develop the LED Matrix Link was to display messages at my wedding in May. The idea was to have guests be able to send messages to it during the reception. I decided to use Twitter since most people use it and there are plenty of code examples to get me started. Good thing I have a Ethernet shield I got on clearance at Radio Shack, perfect project to put it to use. I am not sure this will be the final design since I have to figure out the best way to get Internet at the reception.

When I started writing the code I only had two LED Matrix Links to play with so I used the Arduino Leonardo. As I added more code for Ethernet and Twitter functions, I quickly ran out of SRAM so I needed to find a microcontroller with more SRAM in my stash. I had two options, the Arduino Mega 2560 or the Arduino Due Beta. I quickly ruled out the Arduino Due for now since it is 3.3v even though the Ethernet Shield will work as the MAX7219 needs 5v. (It turns out I could use the AS1107 which only needs 2.7v but I would have to swap out the 33k resistor for a lower value to maintain brightness.) So the Arduino Mega 2560 it is!

Mixing code from this project (http://www.mobilewill.us/2012/10/new-project-sneak-peek.html) and this forum post I was able to get a tweet based on a hashtag search to show up on the display. The code uses a unauthenticated API so this limits how many times you can query Twitter per hour. Generally you don’t want to do more once or twice per minute. My first thought was I am sure sometimes I am going to get more than one tweet per minute. Hmmm…. After some research and playing with the Twitter API I added a loop to read all of the tweets up to a certain time. So say you want the last hour of tweets it will keep reading tweets from the Ethernet stream until the time-stamp is an hour prior to the first received tweet. This helps limit the memory used and allows you to cycle those tweets on the display….

Read more.

SHOW AND TELL 4/13/2013 (video).

Make your origami glow! It’s easy to make a simple circuit illuminating any origami form. This tutorial will show you how to make a paper lotus flower and frog, and two ways to light them up. You can either affix a coincell battery on the underside of the form or install LEDs to use with a piece of a clear, conductive material called ITO. By powering up the whole plane with a battery pack and alligator clips, you can play out scenes with your flowers and frogs by arranging them on this clear “pond” to switch them on. This is a great project to do at a workshop or with kids!

Tutorial photos and special assistance creating this project provided by Risa Rose.

Watch the video on YouTube (please subscribe!) and Vimeo.

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.

NEW PRODUCT – rePaper – 2.0″ Graphic eInk Development Board – 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 2.0″ 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.

This kit comes with a driver board that is powered from 3V and has level shifting on all the I/O pins so it can be used with 5V microcontrollers such as the Arduino. The PCB also has a lot of driver circuitry required to keep the display running smoothly such a temperature sensor, FLASH memory and ZIF socket. All signals are broken out to a 20 male socket header on the left. A 20 pin socket/socket cable is included to make wiring easier and there’s also some extra-long header so you can plug these wires into Arduino header or a breadboard.

The display is 2″ diagonal and 200 x 96 resolution true eInk graphical display. These are intended for use as small dynamic signage in grocery stores since a barcode displayed on it can be scanned by a laser barcode-reader. The display does not require any power to keep the image and will stay ‘on’ without any power connection for many days before slowly fading. Of course, it’s also daylight readable and is very high contrast. This makes it excellent for data-logging applications, outdoor displays, or any other ultra-low power usages.

The good news is that rePaper/PDI have provided a suite of example code for Arduino UNO/Leonardo as well as the MSP430 Launchpad and also have a site with some documentation on how to wire up the displays and datasheets. However, please note: the displays are quite large pixel-wise and to dynamically write to the display requires 3K of RAM – more than the Arduino/Launchpad so the current example code only displays what are stored in a 8-pin FLASH chip in the devboard. (By default that FLASH contains a picture of a cat and some imaged text, see photos above) That means that right now we don’t have example code for drawing to the eInk display directly with calls like drawLine() or println(). It’s very likely that using an Arduino Mega or Due a fully buffered dynamic display library could be written but that code doesn’t exist yet (and there is no ETA as to when it might be done). For these reasons, we suggest that this product is for customers who are interested in bleeding edge technology and are comfortable writing and hacking on code!

Tons more information including wiring diagrams, datasheets & and links to example code at rePaper!

In stock and shipping now!

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!

LED space helmet via Wired design

The Magic Cube by Pixelux on designboom:

the french motion/sound graphics company pixelux studio has recently created an interactive and generative installation that thrives on the power of the collective effort.  twenty-eight bicycles connected – through a rather complex integrated system of light, sound, and video – to a continuous three-dimensional display around the statue of the venerated king louis XIV interprets the physical work of the cyclists into a visual and audible display in a three-minute stint. the intensity of the light-show is entirely based upon the exertion of the users, with thebicycles’ top speed being rewarded with an all-white maximum-power light and a fireworks display to reward the riders. 

NEW PRODUCT – Breadboard-friendly RGB Smart NeoPixel – Pack of 4. This is the easiest way possible to add small, bright RGB pixels to your project. We took the same technology from our Flora NeoPixels and made them breadboard friendly, with two rows of 3 x 0.1″ spaced header on each side for easy soldering, chaining and breadboarding. 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.

These pixels have full 24-bit color ability with PWM taken care of by the controller chip. Since the LED is so bright, you need less current/power to get the effects you want. The driver is constant current so its OK if your battery power changes or fluctuates a little.

Each pixel draws as much as 60mA (all three RGB LEDs on for full brightness white). An Arduino can drive up to 500 pixels at 30 FPS (it will run out of RAM after that). Using ribbon cable you can string these up to 6″ apart (after that, you might get power droops and data corruption)

Each order comes with 4 individually controllable pixels. In the photos above we show the pixels with headers soldered on, but the pixels do not come with any headers. You can pick up some in the shop if you need.

In stock and shipping!

NEW PRODUCT – HDMI/VGA/NTSC/PAL Display – 10.1 Diagonal – 1280×800 IPS. Yes, this is an beautiful bright 10.1″ TFT display with incredibly high resolution and great angle-visibility! We tried to get the thinnest, brightest, highest resolution display that would be good for embedded computing usage. The visible display measures 10″ diagonal and is a ‘raw’ display as is used in a tablet, ultra thin with some mounting tabs around the edge. We include a driver board with HDMI, VGA and Composite inputs. The display is very easy to use – simply connect the included 9VDC adapter to the 2.1mm center-positive DC jack, then connect a digital video source to one of the ports. Voila, a display!

There’s a little wired PCB with little buttons that let you enter a menu system for adjusting brightness, color and contrast. It tried to auto-detect which input you have and switches to that one or you can ‘select’ from the menu which to display.

To demonstrate it, we took some photos with the display connected to a Raspberry Pi, but it will also work connected to any device with HDMI, VGA or NTSC/PAL output. It will not work with a device that only outputs DVI or SECAM.

For use with a Raspberry Pi we suggest editing config.txt to set “hdmi_safe=1″ output for best results (otherwise, the Pi may not ‘recognize’ the HDMI display and revert to composite output)

A 9V US-prong power adapter is included. The power supply may vary from the one shown in the photo, but it will definitely have a US 2-prong plug and will be a switching supply that can be used with 110-240VAC. We also powered it with 12V and it worked fine, and it might work at 5V.

In stock and shipping now!

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.

Jeremy Smith shared his RGB LED Driver project with us, a means of powering an RGB LED strip using a Pi, one of our 16-channel 12-bit PWM/Servo Drivers, and some mosfets:

The code lets you fade between colors or walk randomly between max and min values for some nice environmental effects.

From the Github page for the RGB_LED_DRIVER project:

RGB_LED_Driver

This software can be used to drive an analog RGB LED strip using a raspberry pi and adafruit’s 16-channel 12-bit PWM/Servo Driver – PCA9685: http://www.adafruit.com/products/815

The Circuit:

Here’s the basic idea:

• Hook up the pi to the PCA9685 breakout board using the I2C connections.
• Connect the pi’s 3.3V output to VCC on the PCA9685 breakout board. Leave V+ floating.
• Follow this tutorial for the RGB LED strips: http://learn.adafruit.com/rgb-led-strips/usage
  • I used the N-channel MOSFETs – three of them, one for each channel
  • Connect the +12V from the LED strip to an external power supply (do NOT use your pi for this!)
  • Connect the ground side of the power supply to the pi ground
  • Instead of using the PWM outputs from the arduino, we’ll use the PWM outputs from the PCA9685.
  • Connect up the PWM output 0 to the MOSFET with the red wire from the LED strip.
    Output 1 goes to green, output 2 goes to blue.

Read more.

Featured Adafruit Products

Adafruit 16-Channel 12-bit PWM/Servo Driver – I2C interface – PCA9685: You want to make a cool robot, maybe a hexapod walker, or maybe just a piece of art with a lot of moving parts. Or maybe you want to drive a lot of LEDs with precise PWM output. Then you realize that your microcontroller has a limited number of PWM outputs! What now? You could give up OR you could just get this handy PWM and Servo driver breakout. When we saw this chip, we quickly realized what an excellent add-on this would be. Using only two pins, control 16 free-running PWM outputs! You can even chain up 62 breakouts to control up to 992 PWM outputs (which we would really like to see since it would be glorious). (read more)

TFT Wristwatch on Lucidtronix:

Using the enchanting TFT LCD Screen from adafruit and the DS1307 chip for keeping the time we demonstrate a wearable wristwatch with full spectrum 16-bit color. Displays the time and date in analog, digital and animated formats. Using our color library we color code the time so that each minute is a journey through the rainbow! The watch contains a Piezo buzzer so it can be used as an alarm or as a stop watch. The on-board potentiometer lets you change the time should you find yourself in a new time zone, for example. There is a great tutorial at adafruit on how to use the DS1307 chip to keep track of time. Our circuit is based on that one but use surface mount components and hooks up directly to the SDA and SCL pins on the SMD Atmega328 IC.

1.8″ SPI TFT display, 160×128 18-bit color – ST7735R driver – We just love this little 1.8″ TFT display, with true TFT color (up to 18-bits per pixel!), fine 160×128 resolution, two white LED backlight that runs on 3.3V and a very easy SPI interface that requires only 4 or 5 digital pins to send pixels to the display.

Eric Michaud tweets: “Best LED Throwies packaging I’ve seen so far.”

LED bulbs last decades, save electricity, don’t shatter, don’t burn you, save hundreds of dollars, and now offer plummeting prices and blossoming features. What’s not to like? You’d have to be a pretty dim bulb not to realize that LED light is the future…

LEDs last about 25 times as long as incandescents and three times as long as CFLs; we’re talking maybe 25,000 hours of light. Install one today, and you may not own your house, or even live, long enough to see it burn out. (Actually, LED bulbs generally don’t burn out at all; they just get dimmer.)

Read more

Check out this great video (in Spanish) about a “Calcuino” project from Opiron Electronics built using one of our 2.8″ TFT Touch Shield for Arduino, and tuned up on the Adafruit Forums here. Here’s their project announcement at Opiron.com:

We won’t share today what a calculator is or what it does, we have all used one and certainly has been useful in many situations. We intend to do one with a TFT touchscreen and an Arduino, and we christened it: “Calcuino”. It incorporates all the basic functions:
Addition / subtraction / multiplication / division and RESET button and DELETE button.

Read more.

Featured Adafruit Product!

2.8″ TFT Touch Shield for Arduino – 2.8″: Spice up your Arduino project with a beautiful large touchscreen display shield with built in microSD card connection. This TFT display is big (2.8″ diagonal) bright (4 white-LED backlight) and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 240×320 pixels with individual pixel control. It has way more resolution than a black and white 128×64 display. As a bonus, this display has a resistive touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen…. (read more)

Check out this awesome, fully-printable GlaDOS robotic ceiling arm lamp Instructable tutorial — to which the designer is looking to add more and more functionality. Here’s a piece about it over at 3ders.org:

dragonator uploaded full instructions on how to make this lamp on instructables for entering the UP! contest in the lamps and lights contest. Due to shortage of time and overheating problem, the robot arm doesn’t function properly. However if you do not plan to use this as a moving arm, dragonator has also designed parts to replace the servo’s and moving parts. So before dragonator figures out a working robotic arm you can skip most of the wiring and only use it as a lamp.

To make this lamp you will need a 3D printer, tools, accessories, electronics and a lot of time. First you need between 40 and 60 hours to get all the parts printed. To make your own personal GlaDOS look extra awesome, you will need to sand and paint the printed parts. This will remove most of the visible printing lines and give all of the parts the right color. After sanding, you have to prime and paint them. Then you can start with assembling the base and the body of GlaDOS and afterwards wire it up and mount it to ceiling.

Read more.

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!

Adam Mayer dissected an old LCD display into its constituent layers. He writes:

These are seven layers of a backlight from an old laptop LCD. The amount of optical engineering required to produce a nice, even glow from an edge-lit panel is impressive.

The layers include horizontal and vertical polarizing films, a diffusion screen for the backlight, and anti-reflex glass.

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. 

RGB Pixel Clock via Hackaday

Build your own stand-alone temperature and humidity display with this guide on Instructables.

The temperature in my office at work varies quite a bit depending on the time of day, season, and the whims of the other people I share the floor with. When I’m sitting at my desk shaking uncontrollably or sweating profusely it would be nice to know if it’s due to the temperature or just work related stress. A simple $5.00 thermometer would suffice, but where’s the fun in that? Making my own thermometer might cost ten times as much, but I might learn something in the process and it would be way cooler than any cheap store bought thing? I’d rather make something myself even if I have to pay a “maker’s premium.”

The matrices use a driver chip that does all the heavy lifting for you: They have a built in clock so they multiplex the display. They use constant-current drivers for ultra-bright, consistent color (the images above are photographed at the dimmest setting to avoid overloading our camera!), 1/16 step display dimming, all via a simple I2C interface. The backpacks come with address-selection jumpers so you can connect up to four mini 8×8′s or eight 7-segments (or a combination, such as four mini 8×8′s and four 7-segments, etc) on a single I2C bus.

In Stock and Shipping Now!

LED / Mini Lightbulb Tester by sjroth on Instructables:

Something I love to do is to take apart old, broken electronic devices and salvage parts from them. From many of these devices I get LEDs, and testing these can be very annoying if I don’t have any 3V button cells lying around. I also occasionally use miniature lightbulbs for some projects or experiments, and they take quite some effort to test, because you need a holder. So I decided to make an LED and mini lightbulb tester.

An update to a new product we announced last week. We’ve added a new photo to the product page for our 10″ Pixel Qi LCD Display, to illustrate how it looks in reflected mode.

We’re really excited to offer the revolutionary Pixel Qi display, a full color screen that can also be used in daylight. The Qi has three modes – backlit color, backlit grayscale and daylight grayscale. In normal office/indoor use you’ll want to go with keeping the backlight on to reveal the color layer. The screen works just like any other 10″ TFT with fast refresh (not like slow e-ink). When a bright light shines on it, the display turns ‘gray’ but is still visible. When outdoors in bright light, the backlight can be turned off to revert to a transflective display mode which is much lower power. For much more information please check out the Pixel Qi website.

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.

Ladyada gave me some ITO (indium tin oxide)-coated plastic and glass samples to play with, so I affixed some LEDs to this transparent conductive material! Watch the video on YouTube (please subscribe)!

NEW PRODUCT – Pixel Qi 10″ Dispay with Controller – 1024×600 HDMI/VGA/NTSC/PAL – We’re really excited to offer the revolutionary Pixel Qi display, a full color screen that can also be used in daylight. The Qi has three modes – backlit color, backlit grayscale and daylight grayscale. In normal office/indoor use you’ll want to go with keeping the backlight on to reveal the color layer. The screen works just like any other 10″ TFT with fast refresh (not like slow e-ink). When a bright light shines on it, the display turns ‘gray’ but is still visible. When outdoors in bright light, the backlight can be turned off to revert to a transflective display mode which is much lower power. For much more information please check out the Pixel Qi website.

We’ve packaged up this cool screen with a driver board and power supply. Since the screen is 3.3V LVDS, it’s very hard to connect directly to a microcomputer. The adapter board has a cable that plugs to the screen, there’s a data line and a separate backlight line. (If you want to use the display in low-power backlight-less mode, simply disconnect that plug.) Simply power the controller board with 5-24VDC (we include a 9V power supply) and supply video. You can use HDMI, VGA or NTSC/PAL so you’re covered no matter what interface you want to use! There’s a little keypad thingy you can use to select the input and adjust contrast/brightness/color/etc.

Each order comes with one Pixel Qi screen, LVDS cable, controller board and power adapter. No enclosure, case or stand is included. To demonstrate it, we took some photos with the display connected to a Raspberry Pi, but it will also work connected to any device with HDMI, VGA or NTSC/PAL output. It will not work with a device that only outputs DVI or SECAM. HDMI cable and Raspberry Pi not included!

For use with a Raspberry Pi we suggest editing config.txt to set “hdmi_safe=1″ output for best results (otherwise, the Pi may not ‘recognize’ the HDMI display and revert to composite output). Unfortunately Raspbian does not natively support 1024×600 resolution so there will be some black bars around the edge. However, we used it with a Windows computer and it filled the entire screen – just check that your device can use 1024×600.

A 9V US-prong power adapter is included. The power supply may vary from the one shown in the photo, but it will definitely have a US 2-prong plug and will be a switching supply that can be used with 110-240VAC.

Display:

• Resolution: 1024 x 600 (color RGB) and 3072×600 (backlight off, grayscale)
• Visible area: 222mm x 125mm (10.06″ diagonal)
• Brightness: 165 Nits (dark room), 235 Nits (office lighting), 1000+ (daylight)
• Pixel Qi PQ 3Qi-01 Datasheet has lots more details

LVDS Driver:

• Power with 5-24VDC
• 700mA power draw at 12V
• Auto-detects between VGA, HDMI and Composite

In stock and shipping now!

Alex Bain has been contributing a number of tutorials towards the development of the Open Source Universal Remote project. He sent in this tip along with this message:

I’m trying to make a completely open hardware + open source web enabled universal remote (powered by a RaspberryPi). I started the project to learn electronics and it’s starting to take on a life of it’s own.

The tutorials he has been creating for each stage of this project are very helpful and I encourage you to check out the others in addition to “Controlling LIRC from the web” that he shares at the head of this tutorial:

In this post I will cover how to create a web interface + API for LIRC, the Linux Infrared Remote Control project. I will be using NodeJS and a RaspberryPi in this post, but the ideas generalize to other languages and hardware. This post will serve as Part 3 of my open source universal remote project posts. If you haven’t had an opportunity to read the first two posts, I suggest checking out Universal remote experiments (Part 1) and Setting up LIRC on the RaspberryPi (Part 2) before proceeding. You may also want to read Installing NodeJS on your RaspberryPi, where I cover installing NodeJS.

If you’re completely new to the RaspberryPi and want to learn more I wrote a RaspberryPi Quickstart post which covers everything from purchasing the parts to configuring the WiFi. Check that out if you’re new to the RaspberryPi ecosystem.

With that out of the way, let’s get started! ….

Read more.

Game of life DIY by Manuel Montoya Aguirre:

Ever since I discovered John Conway’s “Game of life” I have been obsessed about the interesting patterns of such a simple algorithm. A few weeks ago I decided to design a USB toy capable of running the game of life on a tiny 8×8 LED Matrix. This is what I came up with.

Since most of the stuff I used is easy to find and not very expensive, I decided to share the diagrams and the code so you can build your own Game of Life. The Arduino code is available here. I got the parts from adafruit for $17 + shipping (I didn’t buy an Arduino)

• 8×8 LED Matrix with I2C Backpack
• Rotary Encoder with Knob
• Arduino
• Tactile switch

After wiring it, your project should look like this

Upload the Arduino sketch and repeat the following for next 5 hours: Stare, push button, stare, push button, stare, push button.

The cool thing about this project is that you can pause the evolution by pushing the rotary encoder. Then you can go through each step (“tick” for those who know their automaton) until you find a stable universe or extinction. Currently there is no backwards evolution but I am planning to implement it on the next update using memory to store the last 10 Universes.

Read more here and here.

NEW PRODUCT! Adafruit Beginner LED Sewing Kit - Add LED accents to textile projects with Adafruit’s LED Sewing Kit! Stitch a glowing circuit with conductive thread– this kit comes with everything you need to get started:

• 1 bobbin of 2-ply conductive thread
• 2 x sewable CR2032 battery holders
• 2 x CR2032 batteries
• 4 x candle flicker LEDs – they twinkle automatically, no need for a microcontroller or external circuit!
• 4 x 5mm snaps to use as as sewable switches
• Needle set

This kit comes with enough supplies to make two projects with two LEDs each, or one project with four LEDs. Great for embroidery and needlework, light-up jewelry and hair accessories, shoes, plush toys, and more. This is a great beginner kit for kids (no soldering!) and adults alike who are looking to get into soft circuits and wearable electronics.

Check out our guide for the LED Sewing Kit on the Adafruit Learning System!

Learn to make a Candle Flicker Hairbow with our project tutorial!

In stock and shipping now!

Make a twinkling accent for your updo! This tutorial will teach you to make a ribbon bow and simple LED circuit. One Adafruit LED Sewing Kit has enough supplies for two bows, so make this project with a friend! The included LEDs contain a tiny chip that flickers the LEDs to simulate a candle’s glow, so all we have to do is power them up! Check out the complete candle flicker LED hair bow tutorial at the Adafruit Learning System and watch the video on YouTube (please subscribe!) and Vimeo.

photos by john de cristofaro / adafruit

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!

Moritz Waldemeyer posts on Instagram:

Taking electronic couture to new heights together with @ErevosAether for @Audi

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!