NEW PRODUCT – Waterproof 3xAA Battery Holder with On/Off Switch. Keep your power source safe and toasty in these waterproof 3xAA battery holders. They’re just like classic switched battery holders, but designed for survival! The case has a rubber gasket around the edge of the case (its black and hard to see in the photos but it is there) and attaches together with 4 machine screws. What we like about this design is that the hexnuts are captive in one side and you can assemble/disassemble as many times as you need. There’s a potted power switch and a rubber-boot on-off switch (press to turn on/off). Use with any alkaline or rechargeable batteries for about 4.5V output.
Would work great with our waterproof DC power plugs (just use heatshrink to waterproof the solder connections)
The power cable wires are not polarity marked, use any multimeter to verify the polarity during use.
Weight: 36 grams
2″ (2.5″ with machine screw ears) x 3″ x.8″ (50mm (63mm with machine screw ears) x 77mm x 20mm)
I was digging around trying to find some information on an obscure LCD module, and came across this interesting table (compiled partially in Russian) that correlates a lot of older mobile phones with their specific LCDs, LCD controllers, dimensions, serial bus, etc. If you’re looking for cheap LCDs of a specific physical size or resolution, this might be a good starting point since there may still be spare parts floating around out there. If nothing else, it’s just an interesting read looking at how much time and effort went into this thing (presumably a repair shop owner, or something similar). Original Excel Spreadsheet: http://vrtp.ru/index.php?act=Attach&type=post&id=385043, or saferHTML conversion courtesy google.
Artist Alex George started collecting miniature Disneyland Main Street Electrical Parade floats a couple years ago. He then got the idea to take the miniatures, and bring them to life. He used a whole army of BlinkM’s, some amazing CAD work, a new recreation of Disneyland’s main street, and help from what looks to be a homemade CNC machine.
Anyway, the video is really well done, and the final product is worthy as Disneyland attraction on its own.
NEW PRODUCT – 4 x AA Battery Holder with On/Off Switch. Make a nice portable power pack with this 4 x AA battery holder. It fits any alkaline or rechargeable AA batteries in series. There’s a snap on cover and an on/off switch which can be handy when wiring to something without a switch.
The four batteries are held in series, for a nominal output of 6V DC for alkaline (6.4V when fresh, 4V when dead), and 4.8V DC for rechargeables (5.2V when fully charged, 4.4V when discharged). Using rechargeables will make this work nicely with nearly any 5V project, with alkalines you may want to put a 1N4001 in series to drop the voltage from 6V down to 5.3V.
Box Dimensions: 2.5″ x 2.66″ x 0.75″
Cable: 6″ long
Weight: 31.84g
NEW PRODUCT – Dual H-Bridge Motor Driver for DC or Steppers – 600mA – L293D. Run four solenoids, two DC motors or one bi-polar or uni-polar stepper with up to 600mA per channel using the L293D. These are perhaps better known as “the drivers in our Adafruit Motorshield”. If you accidentally damaged the drivers in a shield, you can use one of these puppies to replace it. Or you can breadboard something on your own!
Each chip contains two full H-bridges (four half H-bridges). That means you can drive four solenoids, two DC motors bi-directionally, or one stepper motor. Just make sure they’re good for under 600 mA since that’s the limit of this chip. They do handle a peak of 1.2A but that’s just for a short amount of time. What we like most about this particular driver is that it comes with built in kick-back diodes internally so you dont have to worry about the inductive kick damaging your project or driver
There’s a PWM input per driver so you can control motor speed. Runs at 5V logic. Good for motor voltages from 4.5V up to 36V! This wont work well for 3V motors. The motor voltage is separate from the logic voltage.
It’s DIP package so very easy to work with on a breadboard or perfboard. It has two amplifiers inside. It can run from voltages as low as 2.7V and up to 12V. It has rail to rail input and output, which is a common problem for beginners who don’t know how to bias op amps (cheaper op-amps such as the LM358 can’t handle a full range of input voltage!) 4 MHz gain bandwidth & 1V/us slew so you can drive fairly fast signals. Best of all it has a beefy output that can push up to 80mA, so you can drive small speakers and headphones directly.
Great for amplifying audio, conditioning sensors, buffering analog signals, etc.
NEW PRODUCT – 3×8 Male Header – 4 pack. Three rows!? Yes! These chunks of 0.1″ header has yet-another-row – handy for when you want to connect cables that come in sets of three, like perhaps sensors, or servos. These plug into any standard 0.1″ spacing perf-boards or other PCBs and work nicely with our female-ended wire sets. Comes in a set of four pieces, each piece is 3 rows by 8 rows. You can stack these next to each other in any direction.
NEW PRODUCT – Breadboard-friendly SPDT Slide Switch. These nice switches are perfect for use with breadboard and perfboard projects. They have 0.1″ spacing and snap in nicely into a solderless breadboard. They’re easy to switch no matter what size fingers you have, but not so easy that they’ll get flipped by accident. Work great as on/off switches or selector switches, the middle pin is connected to either the left or right pin depending on which way the slider is pushed.
NEW PRODUCT – PS/2 Wired Connector – Panel Mount MiniDIN. Although you may not see PS/2 keyboards & mice as often on desktop computers, there’s still tons of them out there, and they’re really easy to interface to a microcontroller. PS/2 devices are powered by 5V and use two data pins to communicate back and forth. There’s tons of example code out there for every kind of microcontoller (including Arduinos) for keyboard and mouse interfacing.
So all you need to do is connect from the PS/2 plug to your breadboard. Unfortunately, these plugs are not breadboard friendly. That’s why we really dig this connector. It’s sturdy and easy to panel mount, and has pre-soldered wires connected to the 6 contacts (of which 4 are used). We thought it very nice and easy to use!
For PS/2 devices:
Green wire is +5V
Black wire is Ground
Brown wire is Data
Yellow wire is Clock
White wire is sometimes Mouse Data for 2-in-1 splitter cables
Red wire is sometimes Mouse Clock for 2-in-1 splitter cables
Kevin Cook and Rick Galinson at Parallax Expo 2012 (Photo Courtesy: (R) Rich Harman)
To close out National Robotics Week with a bang, Parallax opened its doors to hobbyists, engineers, Boy Scouts and its community at the first annual Parallax Robotics and Microcontrollers Expo on April 13-14, 2012. Over 2,000 attendees showed up to celebrate all things robotic by learning to solder and breadboard, touring the manufacturing facility, battling Sumo Bots and taking in some fun and technical talks, as well as the highlight of the show the flying ELEV-8 Quadcopter contests. Parallax friend Rick Galinson stopped by and attempted to shoot down the ELEV-8 with his Gatling gun (which incorporates the Parallax Propeller chip) that shoots over 3000 paintballs per minute. The ELEV-8 survived the attack but ended up a little painted in the process.
Check out the videos of the Gatling Gun vs. ELEV-8 Quadcopter:
Come visit Parallax at the USA Science and Engineering Festival at the Walter E. Convention Center in Washington, D.C. April 28-29, 2012. This event is free to the public and will have exhibits and stage shows to entertain children of all ages. Stop by our booth (#2145) in the Robot Fest area to learn how or perfect your soldering skills on your very own Scribbler 2 LED badge or come battle it out with our wireless Sumo-bots or learn about different sensor types with our Boe-Bots. Visit http://www.usasciencefestival.org for more information on the event.
This may well be the most overboard promotional video I’ve ever seen for a soldering iron (or any test/lab equipment!), but it had me itching to pull out the credit card and lay down 1000 EUR for the dual head station with the rework tweezers!
PS: Am I the only one that felt like this soldering station could single-handedly defeat the invading Roman hoards with that epic battle music?
This is the first of a series of posts looking at software that teaches kids about electronics. We will start by booting up the earliest electronics game that I know of called “Rocky’s Boots”. This was released by the Learning Company in 1982 and later followed up with “Robot Odyssey” in 1984. The same game engine was used by a number of other educational games at that time.
Rocky’s Boots teaches the user how to connect logic gates, flip flops, clocks and sensors to accomplish simple tasks. While I appreciate the game the logic gate tutorial section was more enjoyable for me to go through. Within minutes of following the logic gate tutorial you will see fascinating things. My favorite was connecting a not gate to itself and watching it become a oscillator.
There are two ways that I’ve played Rocky’s Boots.
1. The Easy Way – Web based using virtualapple. This is a little slow and takes away from the gaming experience.
2. The Cool Way - Local emulation on OS/X using Virtual ][. This was way more fun booting up a Apple //E disk and having a full screen retro gaming experience. I'm sure if you fired this emulator up in a public space any passer by would have to stop and comment.
Here is what I had to do to get the Apple II version of Rocky's Boots up and running on OS/X.
- download Virtual ][
- start virtualII
- download apple //e rom
* ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/emulators/rom_images/
* apple iie rom.zip
- Make sure rom file is unzipped and ends in .rom or .ROM
- Make sure rom file is in same folder as virtual][
- Start Virtual ][
- Press the Disks button and launch game.dsk
- Turn the speed dial to 3
- Use the caps lock key
What did I like about Rocky's Boots?
- The tutorials are focused. One room at a time
- Easy to learn key movements (i, j, k, m space bar)
- Excellent tutorials - logic gates, flip flops and clocks
What I do not like about Rocky's Boots.
- Devices like clackers and knives seemed too abstract when compared with modern electronics
- In game circuits seemed overly busy and complicated losing my attention
All of my requirements sheets are geared toward high school environments. If you require either easier or harder requirements feel free to make a request! My objective on the requirements sheet is to have the students familiar enough with the component that they can use it effectively in their designs and troubleshoot problems when they arise. Please feel free to modify the sheet to fit your needs.
Please note! This is an SDHC card, and may not work with very old projects or products that only support SD cards. All of the Adafruit projects and products use SD/HC-compatible code. Make sure you can use this card before purchasing for non-Adafruit products. The brand itself may vary but we use only quality name-brand from reputable suppliers
NEW PRODUCT – NPN Bipolar Transistor (PN2222) – 10 pack. Transistors are powerful little electronic switches, and we really like these NPN transistors whenever we need to control medium-power electronics such as small motors, solenoids, or IR LEDs. We find them so handy, they come in a pack of 10!
Each transistor is a general purpose amplifier, model PN2222 (same pinout as the 2N3904) and has a standard EBC pinout. They can switch up to 40V at peak currents of 1A (not continuously, just peak!), with a DC gain of about 100. They’re basically your garden-variety NPN, and do the job with class! For more details, check the datasheet.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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