Your electronics can now see in dazzling color with this lovely color light sensor. We found the best color sensor on the market, the TCS34725, which has RGB and Clear light sensing elements. An IR blocking filter, integrated on-chip and localized to the color sensing photodiodes, minimizes the IR spectral component of the incoming light and allows color measurements to be made accurately. The filter means you’ll get much truer color than most sensors, since humans don’t see IR. The sensor also has an incredible 3,800,000:1 dynamic range with adjustable integration time and gain so it is suited for use behind darkened glass.
We add supporting circuitry as well, such as a 3.3V regulator so you can power the breakout with 3-5VDC safely and level shifting for the I2C pins so they can be used with 3.3V or 5V logic. Finally, we specified a nice neutral 4150°K temperature LED with a MOSFET driver onboard to illuminate what you’re trying to sense. The LED can be easily turned on or off by any logic level output.
For more flexibility, we’ve made two different versions of this board: A breadboard-friendly breakout, and a wearable version designed to work with the Flora wearable platform.
Stay tuned, on Wearable Wednesday we’re going to have an amazing project you can build these color sensors and FLORA!
NEW PRODUCT – Standalone Momentary Capacitive Touch Sensor Breakout – This breakout board is the simplest way to create a project with a single “momentary” capacitive touch sensor. No microcontroller is required here – just power with 1.8 to 5.5VDC and touch the pad to activate the sensor.
When a capacitive load is detected (e.g. a person touches the sensor-pad area) the red LED lights up and the output pin goes high. You can also solder a wire to the middle pad and create your own capacitive pad if the built-in one isn’t suited to your project.
If you want to save power, the LED can be disconnected from the output pin (cut the trace between the jumper marked as such). We designed this breakout to have the more-responsive “fast mode” which draws about 0.5mA. If you need ultra-low (~50uA) power usage, the mode jumper can be cut on one side & soldered closed on the other to fix it into that mode. Check the datasheet for specific power usage measurements.
Comes with a fully assembled board, and a small stick of 0.1″ header so you can solder and plug it into a breadboard. For additional contacts, we suggest using copper foil, then solder a wire that connects from the foil pad to the breakout.
NEW PRODUCT – Standalone Momentary Capacitive Touch Sensor Breakout – This breakout board is the simplest way to create a project with a single “toggle” capacitive touch sensor. No microcontroller is required here – just power with 1.8 to 5.5VDC and touch the pad to activate the sensor.
This sensor is a toggle output type: touch-on then touch-off. That means that when a capacitive load is detected (e.g. a person touches the sensor-pad area) the red LED will alternate turning off and the output pin will go high or low, respectively. This sensor is good for a project where you want to activate something on the first touch, then deactivate it when touching again, like a switch. You can also solder a wire to the middle pad and create your own capacitive pad if the built-in one isn’t suited to your project.
If you want to save power, the LED can be disconnected from the output pin (cut the trace between the jumper marked as such). We designed this breakout to have infinite time-out. The chip does support having the sensor time-out, so for example, if something is turned on, it will eventually turn off on its own. If you’d like to use this mode, cut the TIMER jumper and then connect a resistor/capacitor to the TIME pin. Check the datasheet for how to calculate the TIME pin to match your desired timeout.
Comes with a fully assembled board, and a small stick of 0.1″ header so you can solder and plug it into a breadboard. For additional contacts, we suggest using copper foil, then solder a wire that connects from the foil pad to the breakout.
NEW PRODUCT – Standalone 5-Pad Capacitive Touch Sensor Breakout – AT42QT1070. This breakout board is the simplest way to create a project with mutiple capacitive touch sensors. No microcontroller is required here – just power with 1.8 to 5.5VDC and connect up to 5 conductive pads to the 5 left-hand pins.
When a capacitive load is detected (e.g. a person touches one of the conductive contacts) the corresponding LED on the right lights up and the output pin goes low. You can use this to update an existing normal-button project where buttons connect to ground when pressed.
Note that only one contact will be detected at once (this is to protect against having a hand brush against two or more contacts at once.
Comes with a fully assembled board, and a stick of 0.1″ header so you can plug it into a breadboard. For contacts, we suggest using copper foil, then solder a wire that connects from the foil pad to the breakout.
Miniature Keyboard- Microcontroller-Friendly PS/2 and USB – Add a typing interface to your project with this microcontroller-friendly miniature keyboard. We found the smallest PS/2+USB keyboard available, a mere 8.75″ x 4.65″ x 0.6″ (220mm x 118mm x 16mm)! It’s small but usable to make a great accompaniment to either a microcontroller project or a computer such as the Beagle Bone or Raspberry Pi. The keyboard supports either USB or PS/2 interface and will automatically adjust to whichever its plugged into (there’s an adapter included).
Comes with a full QWERTY keyboard, and has a num-lock number pad. Nearly all microcontrollers have existing PS/2 keyboard examples that would work fine with this keyboard. For Ardiuno users, we tried out PJRC’s PS2_Keyboard library with great success – just check the ‘simple text’ example for which pins you can connect to on your ‘duino (on an Uno we used digital pins 2 and 3). We suggest our PS/2 adapter cable to make the wiring easy. Start typing and you’ll see the data appear in the serial terminal! (read more)
In this lesson, you will learn how to use the digital inputs on the GPIO connector with a door sensor and a PIR motion detector.
In this lesson, we will concentrate on sensing movement and activation of the door switch. In Lesson 13 we will build on this security sensing to have the Pi use a digital output to control the power to an electrical appliance when movement is detected.
PIR (motion) sensor – PIR sensors are used to detect motion from pets/humanoids from about 20 feet away (possibly works on zombies, not guaranteed). This one has an adjustable delay before firing (approx 0.3-18 seconds), adjustable sensitivity and we include a 1 foot (30 cm) cable with a socket so you can easily reposition the sensor or mount it using the two drills on either side. (read more)
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;
NEW PRODUCT – Maxbotix Ultrasonic Rangefinder – HR-USB-EZ1 – MB1413 – The HRLV-MaxSonar-EZ sensor line is the fastest way to get precision range-finding into your computer. No microcontroller or adapter required, simply connect any micro B USB cable (not included) into the sensor and install the FTDI drivers to get serial sonar distance data via serial on any computer operating system.
The HR-USB-EZ sensor line provides high accuracy and high resolution ultrasonic proximity detection and ranging in air, in a package less than one cubic inch. This sensor line features 1mm resolution, target-size and operating-voltage compensation for improved accuracy, superior rejection of outside noise sources, internal speed-of-sound temperature compensation and optional external speed-of-sound temperature compensation. This ultrasonic sensor detects objects from 1mm to 5meters, senses range to objects from 30cm to 5meters, with large objects closer than 30cm typically reported as 30cm.
USB interface
Resolution of 1 mm
Multi-sensor operation
~250mS between range readings
Maximum Range of 5000 mm (196 inches)
42kHz Ultrasonic sensor measures distance to objects
RoHS compliant
Virtually no sensor dead zone, objects closer than 30 cm range as 30 cm
Small, light weight module
Designed for easy integration into your project or product
Great starting point for users unsure of which sensor to use
NEW PRODUCT – RGB Color Sensor with IR filter – TCS34725 – Your electronics can now see in dazzling color with this lovely color light sensor. We found the best color sensor on the market, the TCS34725, which has RGB and Clear light sensing elements. An IR blocking filter, integrated on-chip and localized to the color sensing photodiodes, minimizes the IR spectral component of the incoming light and allows color measurements to be made accurately. The filter means you’ll get much truer color than most sensors, since humans don’t see IR. The sensor also has an incredible 3,800,000:1 dynamic range with adjustable integration time and gain so it is suited for use behind darkened glass.
We add supporting circuitry as well, such as a 3.3V regulator so you can power the breakout with 3-5VDC safely and level shifting for the I2C pins so they can be used with 3.3V or 5V logic. Finally, we specified a nice neutral 4150&Deg;K temperature LED with a MOSFET driver onboard to illuminate what you’re trying to sense. The LED can be easily turned on or off by any logic level output.
Connect to any microcontroller with I2C and our example code will quickly get you going with 4 channel readings. We include some example code to detect light lux and temperature that we snagged from the eval board software.
A detailed tutorial is in the works, till then, check out our Arduino library and follow our tutorial to install. Wire up the sensor by connecting VDD to 3-5VDC, Ground to common ground, SCL to I2C Clock and SDA to I2C Data on your Arduino. Restart the IDE and select the example sketch and start putting all your favorite fruit next to the sensor element!
Picture a tiny drone that arises from your vegetable garden to shoo away hungry deer. Or maybe a houseplant that, when you’re away, meanders through your rooms like a cat following a sunbeam. Or one that posts a request for water on Twitter.
The future is knocking at the door of home gardening. And, if some do-it-yourselfers have their way, there is no aspect of nature that can’t be improved with a rechargeable motor and a sensor or two.
NEW PRODUCT – Membrane 1×4 Keypad + Extras – Punch in your secret key into this numeric membrane keypad. This keypad has 4 buttons, and since every key has its own wire line, no matrix code is required – just treat these like every day switches. The membrane is soft and has a removable paper backing to expose a strong adhesive so you can stick this on an enclosure and feed the cable through a slot. It’s a simple keypad but that’s why we like it.
We include a 5-pin extra-long header strip so you can plug this into a breadboard with ease.
Technical Details
Weight: 2.83g
Keypad dimensions: 69.14mm / 2.72″ x 20.07mm / 0.79″
Length of cable + connector: 87.31mm / 3.43″ x 14.28mm / 0.56″
NEW PRODUCT – Membrane LED Keypad + extras – This membrane keypad has a single key, but it does have an embedded surface-mount red LED installed. The flex cable is also extra-long, so we can think of a lot of wearable and portable projects that would use this sort of switch and have an LED as feedback (say, to indicate that an action is occuring or the power is on). Since the keypad is soft plastic, it can be sewn with needle and thread.
The back of the pad has a removable paper cover that protects an adhesive backing. You can see how the pins correspond to the LED anode/cathode and button by looking at the photos above.
We include a 3-pin extra-long header strip so you can plug this into a breadboard with ease.
Technical Details:
Weight: 1.97g
Keypad dimensions: 19.05mm / .75″ x 34.92mm / 1.37″
Length of cable + connector: 350mm / 13.77″ x 8.24mm / 0.32″
NEW PRODUCT – AM2315 – Encased I2C Temperature/Humidity Sensor. Finally we have an I2C-interface temperature & humidity sensor in a nice enclosed style. This sensor contains a DS18B20 temperature sensor and a capacitive humidity sensor. A small microcontroller inside does the readings and provides a simple I2C interface for reading the finished & calibrated output data. Especially nice is that this sensor is in a rugged case with mounting bracket, which makes it way superior to a normal PCB-mounted sensor.
While it is not rated as ‘weatherproof’, this sensor would do much better for sensing where there might be wind, rain, zombies, etc. than SHT PCB-breakout sensors, and the i2c interface makes it easier to interface with microcomputers that can’t do the delicate timing of the DHT sensors.
Simply connect the red wire to 5V power, black to ground, yellow wire to your i2c data pin, and the white wire to the i2c clock pin. You cannot change the i2c address so only one sensor per i2c bus. Two ~10Kohm pullup resistors are required for use, connect from the SDA and SCL lines to the power wire, the pullup resistors are not included!
The ADXL345 is a low-power, 3-axis MEMS accelerometer modules with both I2C and SPI interfaces. The Adafruit Breakout boards for these modules feature on-board 3.3v voltage regulation and level shifting which makes them simple to interface with 5v microcontrollers such as the Arduino.
The ADXL345 features 4 sensitivity ranges from +/- 2G to +/- 16G. And it supports output data rates ranging from 10Hz to 3200Hz.
The LSM303 breakout board combines a magnetometer/compass module with a triple-axis accelerometer to make a compact navigation subsystem. The I2C interface is compatible with both 3.3v and 5v processors and the two pins can be shared by other I2C devices. Combined with a 3-axis gyro such as the L3GD20, you have all the sensors you need for a complete IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) for use in aerial, terrestrial or marine navigation.
In this tutorial we will show you how to connect the LSM303 to an Arduino and use it to measure orientation relative to the earth’s magnetic field, and acceleration in three axis.
Pulse Sensor Amped – Pulse Sensor Amped is a greatly improved version of the original Pulse Sensor, a plug-and-play heart-rate sensor for Arduino and Arduino compatibles. It can be used by students, artists, athletes, makers, and game & mobile developers who want to easily incorporate live heart-rate data into their projects. (read more)
Here’s a helpful video tutorial contribution from Adafruit community member David Nash. Thanks for sending this in!
This is a simple project that builds on several of your Raspberry Pi Lesson projects that I thought you might consider including in a more advanced lesson. All of the components were purchased from Adafruit. The project uses your 8×8 matrix as the display so, when the Python program is automatically invoked from bootup, it requires no monitor or keyboard to run. It uses 12C for input and output to two devices and uses one GPIO analog interface. It’s a neat project for a number of reasons not least of which is it provides a means of verifying that your programmable home thermostat is functioning properly.
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