NEW PRODUCT – Adafruit Perma-Proto Super Pack! Pick up a super pack of our Perma-Proto PCBs, perfect for professional prototyping projects! This super pack contains 3 each of our 3 sizes – 9 PCBs total. You’ll always have the right size for whatever you’re working on.
NEW PRODUCT – Adafruit Perma-Proto Full-sized Breadboard PCB – 3 Pack! Customers have asked us to carry basic perf-board, but we never liked the look of most basic perf: its always crummy quality, with pads that flake off and no labeling. Then we thought about how people actually prototype – usually starting with a solderless breadboard and then transferring the parts to a more permanent PCB. That’s when we realized what people would really like is a proto board that makes it easy!
This proto-board is the PCB you always wish you had, but never realized it! We took the basic layout of a full-sized breadboard and turned that into a beautiful PCB. The top side has a while silkscreen, and the same markings you’re familiar with, to make transferring components easy. The bottom has the 5-hole pad design that matches a classic breadboard, with 4 power bus lines on the sides, and no mask so you can easily cut traces when necessary. We used 1.2mm diameter drill holes so even parts with big leads will fit. All holes are thru-plated for strength – these wont peel off with rework. The finish is a gold plate – you won’t get oxidation like with bare copper perf! There are also three mounting holes so you can attach the PCB to your project box.
These are so handy, we decided to put them in a pack of 3. Once you use a Perma-Proto board, you’ll never go back!
NEW PRODUCT – Adafruit Perma-Proto Quarter-sized Breadboard PCB – 3 Pack! Customers have asked us to carry basic perf-board, but we never liked the look of most basic perf: its always crummy quality, with pads that flake off and no labeling. Then we thought about how people actually prototype – usually starting with a solderless breadboard and then transferring the parts to a more permanent PCB. That’s when we realized what people would really like is a proto board that makes it easy!
This proto-board is the PCB you always wish you had, but never realized it! We took the basic layout of a quarter-sized breadboard (basically, a ‘tiny’ breadboard plus power rails) and turned that into a beautiful PCB. The top side has a while silkscreen, and the same markings you’re familiar with, to make transferring components easy. The bottom has the 5-hole pad design that matches a classic breadboard, with 4 power bus lines on the sides, and no mask so you can easily cut traces when necessary. We used 1.2mm diameter drill holes so even parts with big leads will fit. All holes are thru-plated for strength – these wont peel off with rework. The finish is a gold plate – you won’t get oxidation like with bare copper perf! There are also two mounting holes so you can attach the PCB to your project box.
These are so handy, we decided to put them in a pack of 3. Once you use a Perma-Proto board, you’ll never go back!
BACK IN STOCK! Adafruit Perma-Proto Half-sized Breadboard PCB – 3 Pack! Customers have asked us to carry basic perf-board, but we never liked the look of most basic perf: its always crummy quality, with pads that flake off and no labeling. Then we thought about how people actually prototype – usually starting with a solderless breadboard and then transferring the parts to a more permanent PCB. That’s when we realized what people would really like is a proto board that makes it easy!
This proto-board is the PCB you always wish you had, but never realized it! We took the basic layout of a half-sized breadboard and turned that into a beautiful PCB. The top side has a while silkscreen, and the same markings you’re familiar with, to make transferring components easy. The bottom has the 5-hole pad design that matches a classic breadboard, with 4 power bus lines on the sides, and no mask so you can easily cut traces when necessary. All holes are thru-plated for strength – these wont peel off with rework. The finish is a gold plate so it wont oxidize like bare copper! There are also two mounting holes so you can attach the PCB to your project box
These are so handy, we decided to put them in a pack of 3. Once you use a Perma-Proto board, you’ll never go back!
NEW PRODUCT – 4-pin JST SM Receptacle Cable. This 4-wire cable is 20cm long and has a JST SM type connector receptacle on the end. It mates with the JST SM plug cable and is good for whenever you have 4 wires you want to be able to plug and unplug. We like the solid and compact nature of these connectors and the latch that keeps the cable from coming apart easily. For more information, check the JST SM connector datasheet.
Our digital addressable LED strip and 12mm pixels also come with JST SM connectors and you can use these cables to connect to the input or output port
This cable can be used to connect to the OUTPUT port of our LPD8806 digital addressable LED strip so that you can connect another strip to the output, or perhaps apply power to the ‘output’ end. It can be used to connect to the INPUT port of our WS2801 LED Pixels so that you can easily plug it into your Arduino or similar.
BACK IN STOCK – Powerswitch tail 2! The Power Switch Tail II is a smart alternative to slicing apart power cords to wire up your own relays. Its a compact 120V 3-pronged extension cord, with a relay board embedded in the middle. Connect to the relay using two screw terminals and activate by providing a 3 to 12V signal (3mA current draw at 3V, 30mA at 12V). The relay can switch 15 Amp resistive loads such as heaters, small skillets, lights, etc. An LED indicator above the terminals will help you with debugging.
Ideal for people making their own controllable lights, SMT reflow plates, boilers or heaters, coffee roasters, home automation projects, etc.
The Power Switch Tail II is opto-isolated so you don’t need a transistor or protection diode. The input acts like an LED so its safe for use with any microcontroller or logic pin.
Please note, this is a safer alternative to wiring up your own relays but still requires common sense and knowledge of electrical circuits. Stay within the rated limit of the relay and de-rate properly when not using resistive loads. Do not leave DIY electrical projects unattended or where they can get wet! This product is intended to be used by advanced hobbyists who are comfortable working with power supplies.
BACK IN STOCK AND UPDATED PRODUCT – Powerswitch tail 2! The Power Switch Tail II is a smart alternative to slicing apart power cords to wire up your own relays. Its a compact 120V 3-pronged extension cord, with a relay board embedded in the middle. Connect to the relay using two screw terminals and activate by providing a 3 to 12V signal (3mA current draw at 3V, 30mA at 12V). The relay can switch 15 Amp resistive loads such as heaters, small skillets, lights, etc. An LED indicator above the terminals will help you with debugging.
Ideal for people making their own controllable lights, SMT reflow plates, boilers or heaters, coffee roasters, home automation projects, etc.
New! The Power Switch Tail II now is opto-isolated so you don’t need a transistor or protection diode. The input acts like an LED so its safe for use with any microcontroller or logic pin.
Please note, this is a safer alternative to wiring up your own relays but still requires common sense and knowledge of electrical circuits. Stay within the rated limit of the relay and de-rate properly when not using resistive loads. Do not leave DIY electrical projects unattended or where they can get wet! This product is intended to be used by advanced hobbyists who are comfortable working with power supplies.
Do you frequently find yourself looking for odd-ball resistor values or soldering resitors together to try to get as close as possible to some uncommon E96 (1% resistor) value? If you make a lot of prototypes, you might be happy to learn that most major resistor manufacturers offer resistor ‘kits’ containing a certain number of every value. While they aren’t cheap, they do represent a fair value for the amount of work involved packaging and producing them, and if you’re really serious about electronics it can be reassuring to know that you have every value you might need.
To find different kits, you can search Digikey for some variation of this phrase: “res kit 1% 0805″ (changing the package size to match what you want), or here are the Digikey part numbers for some kits manufactured by Yageo (who typically have very competitive prices on their reels of resistors):
0805 1% Resistors (50 of each value):
1.0-9.76: PHC1A-KIT-ND
10.0-97.6: PHC2A-KIT-ND
100-976: PHC3A-KIT-ND
1.00K-9.76K: PHC4A-KIT-ND
10.0K-97.6K: PHC5A-KIT-ND
100K-1.0M: PHC6A-KIT-ND
0603 1% Resistors (50 of each value)
1.0-7.5: PHH1-KIT-ND
10.0-97.6: PHH2-KIT-ND
100-976: PHH3-KIT-ND
1.00K-9.76K: PHH4-KIT-ND
10.0K-97.6K: PHH5-KIT-ND
100K-1M: PHH6-KIT-ND
Arduinos are great, but if you’ve ever tried to mount one on a baseplate or inside an enclosure, you know it can be a pain. While there are some great enclosuresspecifically designed for an Arduino, if you just have a regular box that you want to use, you have to measure and mark out the holes yourself. If all you have is a ruler and a pencil, this isn’t the easiest thing to do.
In the process of working on a robot project, I needed to draw up an Arduino hole pattern and outline in CAD as part of the design. I figured others could use a similar drawing — after some polishing up, I had this Arduino hole dimension drawing (PDF).
You can use it as a reference to the dimensions or as a drilling guide. It is drawn at a scale of 1:1 on a standard 8.5×11 sheet, so you can print it out, lay the drawing down on your mounting surface, and use a pre-drill punch directly on the paper. I’d recommend you use the punch rather than just drilling through the paper, to avoid a “walking” drill bit. If you don’t have a proper punch, you can just use a sharpened nail (we’re not fancy here).
In order to get it to print 1:1, you have to turn off print scaling in Adobe Acrobat. Somewhere in the Acrobat print dialog there’s going to be a “Page Scaling” option. Set it to “None”. There’s a 1-inch scale mark next to the title block in case you want to verify that it printed correctly.
The drawing has dimensions for both the regular Arduino and the Arduino MEGA, and the hole pattern is good for all Arduinos going back to the NG (though the diameter of the holes might be different). The new UNO boards added a fourth mounting hole, which is indicated. It should also work with most “full-size” Arduino clones, such as the EMSL Diavolino and the Seeed Studios Seeeduino, as well as the Netduino boards.
USB/Serial Converter – PL2303. This USB cable adds a DB9 serial port to your computer or laptop. Works with MacOS X, Linux and Windows. Note that this provides +-12V serial (RS232) not 5V serial (TTL), good for old devices like GPS, handhelds, programmers, etc with chunky DB9′s on the side.
These are tested and work great with bit-bang serial devises MiniPOVs, DASA programmers and Serial SpokePOV adapters – note that they are slow in comparison to hardware serial ports due to the high overhead of USB.
Connecting a microcontroller to a computer or laptop is a common problem: For decades, all computers had serial ports and parallel/printer ports. These were great for engineers because they were easy to connect to – data sent from the computer showed up exactly the way it was sent. Nowadays, few computers have parallel or serial ports, they have been replaced with USB. USB is better for users because theres only one connector, and information can be sent really fast with no errors.
But the trade-off is that USB is more complex than serial or parallel since data is wrapped in complicated, super-fast packets. So what if you still want that serial port? Well, you can use a usb-serial converter. These have little chips in them that are very specialized – they show up in your computer as a serial port but they do it through USB. The good news is that these are very common and cheap, but the bad news is that they are not very good for microcontroller hackers.
Why? For one thing, these big 9-pin cables had to reach many meters so what the designers did is make the voltage on them rather high, about 20V from negative to positive. Microcontrollers tend to want no more than 3 or 5V! Plugging this into your microcontroller will quickly damage it permanently! If you want to use one of these cables with your micro, you can build a converter from the 20V down to 5V, often called a MAX232 converter. Some cables are hackable to bring the voltage down so if you’re excited to tear apart an adapter and solder some wires that can be a solution. For most makers, we really suggest you use is an FTDI cable or adapter.
FTDI chips simply take the USB signals and output 3 or 5V cleanly, so you don’t have a risk of zapping your electronics. Another nice thing about these cables and adapter is that you can use the 5V from your computer to power a project, up to half an amp. Basically like the USB/serial adapters they show up as serial ports to your computer, but these have the right voltage levels.
We have two options for FTDIness, cables and adapters. The cables are all in one piece with plugs on either end. The FTDI chip is inside the head of the cable. The adapters are small circuit boards, you can use any miniUSB cable, and the plug in the end matches the pinout of the cable. So why would you want the circuit board? For one, its a little less expensive. Another thing is that it has visible LED that blink when serial data is sent or received, which can be handy for debugging. Another fun thing you can do with the FTDI friend is change the voltage levels for power and data from 5 to 3v or change the 6th pin from RTS to DTR which may be useful for some hacker projects.
OK one question we get a lot is whats the difference between something like the USBtinyISP programmer and an FTDI adapter? Both plug into a USB port, that is true, and both can be used to program AVR. but they are different things. The USBtinyISP and other USB AVR programmers are specially made to program raw AVR microcontrollers, just as they show up from the factory. The USBtinyISP isnt meant for sending debugging messages or other data. On the other hand, if you have a chip with a bootloader on it already, like an Arduino, you can use the FTDI friend to upload new firmware and transmit serial data for debugging or logging.
However, you can’t really use the FTDI friend to program a raw chip without a lot of effort and its pretty slow. So, for programming new AVRs, use a USBtinyISP. To bootload onto preprogrammed AVRs and pass data, use a FTDI friend.
Remember, FTDI Friend is your friend, not your FTDI enemy.
NEW PRODUCT – FTDI Friend + extras – v1.0. Long gone are the days of parallel ports and serial ports. Now the USB port reigns supreme! But USB is hard, and you just want to transfer your every-day serial data from a microcontroller to computer. What now? Enter the FTDI Friend!
The FTDI Friend is a tweaked out FTDI FT232RL chip adapter. Sure, like the well-known FTDI cable, it can provide power to your project and there are 4 signal lines for sending data back and forth. But the Friend can do much more! For example, you can change the signal and power lines to be either 3.3V or 5V. Arduino-derivatives and XBees use the RTS line for programming but what if you need that DTR line? Its there for you. By default, we’ve set it up so that it matches our FTDI cables. The 6th pin is RTS (as of Arduino IDE v18 this will work perfectly for uploading to ‘inos), the power wire is +5V and the signal levels are 3.3V (they are 5V compliant, and should work in the vast majority of 3.3V and 5V signal systems).
And of course, we include a little extra – in this case its the extra-long headers that you can use to plug it into a breadboard, or a 6-pin extension cable (which will also let you rearrange the wire order). There are also blinkies, 2 red & green LEDs that pulse when serial is sent or received.
This is actually not any sort of product or public project (!) – its something we designed to help me evaluate solar panels and how they act when charging batteries. Normally this requires a lot of multimeters and its a bit of a pain to do if you have to constantly change out panels. So we decided we would build a specialized tool that would assist us. Here is what we wanted!
Portable! Its hard to test solar panels inside
Ability to log to an SD card for long-term data analysis (to be added later)
Keep track of the solar panel voltage
Keep track of the battery voltage
Keep track of how much current is going thru the panel to the charger
This design is intended for ~6V panels, single Lithium Polymer cells and chargers. It can very easily be adapted to any kind of panel and charger, you’ll just need to adjust the resistor dividers and such!
Here’s a handy tip from the forum for those etching PBC’s at home: forum post
…about 4 years ago, I saw that someone said that you could protect an etched copper clad PCB with polyurethane once you were done soldering. So as a test, I grabbed a scrap of PCB and scrubbed it up till the copper was shinny. I then sprayed 1/2 the board with polyurethane, and left the other half bare. I put it on a shelf, and it’s stayed there ever since. That was four years ago.
Printable catalog (PDF)
FEED
