New Products 6/15/2013 (video)

• Bare Conductive Greeting Card Kit – Classroom pack (0:04)
• Nixie Seven-Segment Art Scratch-Off Card (1:57) 
• Pixel Art Scratch-Off Card (1:57) 
• My Little Geek by Andrew & Sarah Spear (3:28) 
• USB DIY Connector Shell – Type Mini-B Plug (4:59) 
• USB DIY Connector Shell – Type A Socket (4:59) 
• FLORA Budget Pack (6:30) 
• Inductive Charging Set – 5V @ 500mA max (9:19) 
• Onion Pi Pack – Make a Raspberry Pi Tor Proxy (11:50) 

Here’s a handy DIY Crimp Tool Holder brings more mechanical advantage to your inexpensive off-the-shelf handheld crimp tool — great for short production runs and interactive artwork installs that begin to get a little bit wire happy. Or if you were to break the arms off your crimpers! Via Oomlout:

We were getting frustrated with slow crimping. While not doing enough volume to warrant an automatic machine we augmented our hand crimps to make the job a little bit easier.

Simply grab a cheap pair of of the shelf hand crimps (we used these) cut the bits out and bolt together. You’ll be effortlessly crimping in no time.

Want to Make Your Own:

• On Thingiverse (html)
• Mechanical Reference (pdf)
• Parts Outline (dxf)
• Parts Outline (svg)
• Additional Files and Formats

Read More.

Ask an Engineer 6/15/2013 (video)

Every Saturday night at 10pm ET join us for our weekly live video & chatroom! Visit http://adafruit.com/ask for more info. You can ask anything about electronics, kits at Adafruit or just stop in to meet other makers who are building cool things! At the end of the chat we give away a kit from Adafruit to the winner of our trivia question!

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New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System
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How FPGAs work, and why you’ll buy one.

Today, pretty much everyone has a CPU, a DSP and a GPU, buried somewhere in their PC, phone, car, etc. Most don’t know or care that they bought any of these, but they did.

Will everyone, at some future point, also buy an FPGA? The market size of FPGAs today is about 1% of the annual global semiconductor sales (~$3B vs ~$300B). Will FPGA eventually become a must-have, or will its volume remain relatively low?

We’ll try to answer this question below. In order to see how popular FPGAs could become, we’ll need to discuss what FPGAs are. FPGAs are a programmable platform, but one designed by EEs for EEs rather than for programmers. So for many programmers, FPGAs are exciting yet mysterious; I hope our discussion will help demystify them.

We’ll start with a common explanation of FPGAs’ relatively low popularity. We’ll see why that explanation is wrong – and why, if we take a closer look, we actually come to expect FPGAs to blow the competition out of the water!

This will conclude today’s installment, “Why you’ll buy an FPGA”. A sequel is in the making, titled “Why you won’t buy an FPGA”. There, we’ll see some of the major obstacles standing between FPGAs and world domination.

Check out 6 second electronics hippynurd a short 6 second film for the Adafruit #adafruit6secs electronic film festival (Youtube playlist here for all the entries on YouTube).

The Periodic Table of the Muppets by Mike BaBoon Design.

A comprehensive depiction of many memorable Muppet characters from throughout the years (and some not-so-memorable ones as well).

Each square represents a different character and indicates the primary Muppeteer(s) for that character, as well as the year and production in which the character made its debut. Borders align with hair/hat colour, background aligns with skin/fur colour, and colour of the abbreviated name represents nose colour (for characters with noses that is).

RH Electronics – Israel.

Singapore Robotic – Singapore.

These are just 2 of our distributors in the Asia region, make sure to visit the Adafruit distributor page to view all! We will be spotlighting Adafruit resellers from around the world on a regular basis!

We recently updated our distributor, reseller and hackerspace pricing! Now, 1 quantity has UP TO a 30% discount off many items, this is allows you to get a great discount by just ordering 1 of something. Great for folks who just want to try 1 item of each of something out in their store, etc. As always, once you order 50+ or more of something the discount goes UP TO 40% off many items as well. Note! *Not ALL items have reseller pricing, reseller pricing is for items we can discount for our resellers. We are adding more all the time! Remember, the minimum order is $250 per order, not including shipping.

We have a very easy reseller program and would love to have more great people & companies as a distributors/resellers/hackerspaces. Our products are high-quality and we think they’re the best engineered & designed in the market. How can you be a distributor? Just fill our form here, keep in mind the following questions!

1. Are you an online store, a physical store or a hackerspace that would like to distribute our products? Please include a link.
2. Can you place orders $250 and over (Not including shipping) each time?
3. Can you pay via paypal or credit card? For international large orders, can you pay via wire transfer?
4. Do you have a UPS account? (This is not required, but helpful).

We’ll be adding more features for resellers in 2013 enjoy! To become a distributor, click here.

This Technology Has Been Disconnected by Dave Bledsoe.

Underneath the elevated West Side Highway at 135th and 12th Avenue I found this telephone graveyard. At least a one hundred old, battered pay phones were locked behind a fence near the Park’s Department building. I almost took these on my iPhone, but my irony levels are dangerously low these days.

Check out ARDUINO ROBOT by william foster a short 6 second film for the Adafruit #adafruit6secs electronic film festival (Youtube playlist here for all the entries on YouTube).

Ladyada is working on some LCD interfacing today, and thought maybe some people would find my super-lucky FPC adapter handy so she is going to get some of them manufactured for the shop. When using this adapter board we guarantee you will roll 7′s and select the right SPI mode the first time! Coming soon!

Want to use Adafruit’s NFC Breakout with the Pi?  We’ve made it easier than ever with our updated tutorial: Adafruit NFC/RFID on Raspberry Pi.  It’s been updated to take into account some of the API changes in the latest version (1.7.0-rc7), which now includes some support for the Pi out of the box, and general improvements in performance!

is this good? were invited to create an interactive installation at Nuits Sonores, an electronic music and art festival in Lyon, France, in May 2013.

We worked alongside Lyon-based Architects lookingforarchitecture.com to create a huge interactive pyramid.

A matrix of 6 Kinect cameras tracked people as they moved across the pyramid, triggering DMX lighting in the structure and generative graphics on the screens above.

Special thanks to Pierre-Marie Oullion and Alexis Bergeron from Nuits Sonores, and to Robin Accard from Partizan for making it happen

Firewood record passenger space »Arduino + X = ArduinoPhone – Moderator: Ye Xiaobo.

Arduino is a widely used, easy to expand, develop a simple open-source hardware platform. Arduino is not only artists, designers, enthusiasts, “plaything”, or an engineer’s first DIY platform.

When the Arduino GPRS encounter what? Yes, give me a platform Arduino Phone!

We have developed ArduinoPhone 1.0, which is the first individual of DIY with telephone, text messaging capabilities ArduinoPhone prototypes.

But …… Yes, life is the most powerful, the most exciting thing is this, we have to change, but also more thoroughly subversive! Our ArduinoPhone also need to add the music player functions, add the WIFI function, add NFC capabilities, yes, but also have an appearance make you never forget.
That …… let us come to a creative storm ArduinoPhone 2.0 bar.

Tutorial: Blinking an LED with BeagleBone Black @ The Adafruit Learning System.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to control an external LED using a BeagleBone Black (BBB) from Python. Because the BBB runs Linux, there are many ways in which it can be programmed. In this tutorial we show how to control an output pin and hence LED using Python.

Learn (and blink) more!

Creative types are always exploring the boundaries of artistic expression, but in the case of one Japanese artist, his methods are a little unconventional even for the art world. 73-year-old Tatsuo Horiuchi uses a piece of Microsoft software to make amazing artwork, but it isn’t even paint. It’s Microsoft Excel.

Read more at Geek.com

paper torso (photos).

A torso with removable organs for the Science Lab of the International School Nadi, Fiji Islands built entirely from 200gms/sqm white card. The templates and instructions are now available free of charge from my website at: torso.amorphous-constructions.com/

Sony Smartwatch now open-sourced.

Wearable gadgets have become a real trend. While the other giants like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Samsung are busying with their wearable gadget plans, Sony already has a smartwatch in the market. Although the small device didn’t get too much attention from the tech fans when it launched but it may get a little more  from now with Sony’s recent announcement that its smartwatch has now become open-sourced.

Open SmartWatch Project – SONY.

Sony’s War on Makers, Hackers, and Innovators.

Testing laptop battery: pinout, SMBus, charge capacity @ KuzyaTech.

As a result of visiting Hamfest, I ended up with a laptop to take apart – a fairly new Toshiba Satellite C675D with a broken screen. It’s not a Hamfest if you don’t bring home something to take apart of course! Today we’ll be testing the battery it came with to see if it’s salvageable.The date code says  it was made in 11/2011.

Neat! Never thought of using a SMBus reader to salvage an old laptop battery. You could probably use an Arduino or Bus pirate instead of the TI eval adapter.

As Hardware Startups Take Off, Materials And Technology Marketplace Inventables Raises $3M.

Chicago-based Inventables, a marketplace for technology and materials for developers and designers, has raised $3 million in new funding led by Tim Draper (via Draper Associates) with Dundee Venture Capital, Richard Yoo (founder of Rackspace), Georges Harik, and True Ventures participating. This brings Inventables’ total funding to $5 million.

SYN Shop Podcast Episode 1.

We at SYN Shop are very proud to present the first episode of SYN Shop Talk, the Las Vegas hackerpsace podcast! Pawel takes you on a tour of SYN Shop and the current build out, as well as an introduction to each zone. We chat to Sarah about her delta robot army, working with Mark and her experiences being a member of SYN Shop. We talk to Mark about how he built his delta robot, what it was like collaborating with Sarah, and what he learned.

closeup of the grooves cut into the glass bottle

A few week’s ago we showcased wooden records, which generated eery, ethereal music when played. Now, creative agency shine together with the fabricators gyro constructivists have created a device modeled off of Thomas Edison’s original phonograph design that generates music off of tiny grooves cut into a Beck’s beer bottle (is this going to become a running theme?).

The Beck’s Edison Bottle.

Prepping conductive fabric

Woven Conductive Fabric – Silver 20cm square – This woven conductive fabric is silver-plated nylon. Use small pieces for soft switches, plush keypads, capacitive touch sensors, and other textile interfaces. This highly conductive fabric has a resistance of less than 1 ohm per foot in any direction across the textile. Great for use with FLORA.

With LEDs that require only one pin, you can do a lot with even just a 6-pin microcontroller!

A touch controlled light with 4xWS2812 RGB LEDs and ATtiny 10

This is a small hardware project which utilizes the light_WS2812 library and the TinyTouchLib to implement a touch-button controlled RGB-LED light. Only two output pins of the ATtiny 10 are used.

Atmel Studio project and Eagle files are included.

Make your own smart LED arrangement with the same integrated LED that is used in our NeoPixel strip and pixels. This tiny 5050 (5mm x 5mm) RGB LED is fairly easy to solder and is the most compact way possible to integrate multiple bright LEDs to a design. The driver chip is inside the LED and has ~18mA constant current drve so the color will be very consistent even if the voltage varies, and no external choke resistors are required making your design minimal. Power the whole thing with 5VDC and you’re ready to rock.

In Stock and Shipping Now!

John Batty shared this wild MaKey-MaKey Monday treat with us — and I have been looking forward all weekend to sharing what is potentially the most energetic “whack-a-to-tato”(sic) performance in a software demo put together by humans (above). Batty designed this great game app and shared his code, so that you, too, can create a customized “whack-a-mole” style game, populate it with your friends (enemies? vegetables?), and unleash the boundless energy of clever children upon it.

If you haven’t sipped your morning coffee yet, put it down — you won’t be needing it. Now roll the video….

Whack-A-Potato

Whack-A-Mole reinvented, with small children and potatoes…

Background

This is what happens if you buy a MaKey MaKey interface board for your kids, can’t find any suitable games, and want an excuse to hack something together with the Loom game engine. The game is a modified version of one of the Loom demos (added keyboard support, added sound, modified gameplay).

Installation

The game is free to download from here. … You can replace the mole bitmaps with your own pictures (of children, vegetables, or whatever…) without any code changes.

Read more.

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

USB / DC / Solar Lithium Ion/Polymer charger – v2, NEW AND UPDATED! Make your projects to go green this summer with our specialized USB/Solar Lithium Ion Polymer Battery charger! This charger is a very unique design, perfect for outdoor projects, or DIY iPod chargers. We’ve spent over a year testing and tinkering with this charger to come up with a plug and play solution to charging batteries with the sun and we’re really pleased with what we ended up with.

Namiki Lab (Chiba University) has developed an intelligent air-hockey robot system that can estimate your playing strategy and change its own to keep things interesting.

Electronics show and tell with G+ On-Air hangouts every Saturday at 9:30pm ET. Want to show a project on an upcoming show and tell? Leave a comment on the show and tell announcement on Adafruit’s G+ page: http://google.com/+adafruit

The weekly – SHOW AND TELL is on the Adafruit Industries Google+ page! at 9:30pm ET We will be asking all the folks in the +Limor Fried (ladyada) show-and-tell circle to re-add themselves to the +Adafruit show-and-tell circle shortly.

Please post a comment on the Adafruit page to be added! Make sure you add Adafruit to your circles first!

ASK AN ENGINEER – 10PM ET! SATURDAY 6/15/2013! @collinMel special guest Collin Cunningham!!!!

You can see Collin’s series of videos here “MAKE presents” and Collin’s lab. Collin is a Creative Engineer here at Adafruit, maker of videos and our iOS apps… and MORE!

What is “Ask an engineer”? From the electronics enthusiast to the professional community – “Ask an Engineer” has a little bit of everything for everyone. If you’re a beginner, or a seasoned engineer – stop in and see what we’re up to! We have demos of projects and products we’re working on, we answer your engineering and electronics questions and we have a trivia question + give away each week. Previous chats can be viewed at http://www.adafruit.com/ask

Chat details!

• Visit our new “Ask an Engineer”section on Adafruit at 10pm ET, Saturday nights
• Or visit our Ustream page
• For old schoolers, you can use IRC, you’ll need a Ustream log/pass, check out the Ustream IRC how-to here
• We are #adafruit-industries6796 on IRC server chat1.ustream.tv
• Watch the show with an iPad, iPhone or Android phone!

And don’t forget, 30 minutes before the show we’re doing our weekly show-and-tell. If you are on Google+ and want to join, just add/follow +Adafruit’s page and post a comment so you can be added to the show and tell circle. At 9:30pm ET you will see a link to the hang out. Just keep your mics muted until we call on you and have your project ready.

For those who just want to watch, you’ll be able to watch it live on Ustream here and we usually have a recorded version posted later.

There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 53,900 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!

Featured Community Post!

kapuzniak shared: “Thanks @adafruit for the fun lemon battery experiment, my 3 yr old future engineer loved it!” Wow! (read more)

Don’t miss the chance to catch up with great pieces from the community from this past week! Click the link below!

From the Google+ Community

(Note: Google+ login required.)

RaizzieN shared: “I made the case for transformable quadcopter robot with GoPro HERO3 black edition. Open the case, Pick up the robot, Transform into Walking form, Walk, Transform into flight form, and then Fly…..” (read more)

Sam Harrison shared: “Well I’ve looked into some arduino setups that connect to lcd screens so I think I’m gonna design an autopilot panel. I’d like to make a landing gear with lights that are controlled through the simulator…” (read more)

Heather Solvers shared: “Silver Shaz, the Robot Business Card Holder!”(read more)

Boyan Iliev shared some great Arduino projects! (read more)

james w shared: “An update on my Raspberry Pi – Point and Shoot Camera project, everything but the battery pack fits inside the standard RPi case. Details, pics and the simple Python file I am running are all listed on my blog post about it here.” (read more)

Rifle Creek shared: “the process of creating something unique;
best description… Modern basket weaving with architectural components in Sketchup with the purpose to build a 3D print of a reverse lamp shade” (read more)

omar lopez shared an illustration he made for Xhilo (read more)

Mike Vanderpool shared: “Just finished my Rpi laptop build! Time to take the Pi mobile! Thanks Adafruit Industries!” (read more)

Jeremy Cook shared: “My StrandBeest-style leg. Includes a time-lapse of the construction process as well as a video of it semi-functional.” (read more)

Matt Heilman shared: “Electroplating a Soldering Iron’s Tip.” (read more)

Jack Houweling shared: “Making a new light for my shop with ratchet and boom.” (read more)

Nikolaus Gradwohl (“Local Guru”) shared: “Today I got the “Radio” part of my Raspberry PI based car radio running.” (read more)

sensei wu shared: “been working on my pan and tilt system. i am hoping to make a auto target tracking Nerf gun one day!” (read more)

Jaidyn Edwards shared: “The second robot I have made to help teach robotics to school kids. The idea is that I will disassemble him providing them with instructions as to his assembly and programming. Ben – A Light Following Breadboard Arduino Robot” (read more)

phenoptix shared: “A new bit of kit to help with our office brewing. The Blichmann Engineering Floor Standing Burner. 30lbs of stainless steel capable of delivering 72,000 BTU per hour (that’s 7.6 Million Joules!). Can’t wait to try it out!” (read more)

Michael Overstreet shared: “Not sure if I am going to do anything with this idea but that is what a 3d printer is good for, printing out ideas so you can play with them. I printed out a mock-up of a MX-106 and a extra large bracket. The bracket is very strong by the way. (read more)

Steve Spence shared: “Arduino Voltmeter and temperature sensor: New pics uploaded. System has been in use almost a week and working great!” (read more)

Mark Miller shared: “My continuing efforts in refining the X Y saga of slide mechanisms. I designed a rotary table using a stepper, worm gear combination….I have a larger platter that secures to the mount to provide greater table space. It is very torquey, and has almost no backlash. I also began making some slides that are stepper driven, and made another half dozen or so of these up to play with and try to find an app for. I am now making a Z axis that will span this mechanism for the upsy downsy thing….Or possibly a gantry crane…..Or both.” (read more)

Chris Young shared: “Previously I’ve shared on my blog a special mouse and keyboard emulator that I use to help me access my PC because of my disability. Now in the latest installment of my blog I show how you can create your own infrared remote control mouse device. It would be useful for home theater PC or perhaps when you’re showing that PowerPoint presentation on a projector monitor and you want to be able to walk around the room and not be tied to the computer during the presentation. Complete schematics and source code included.” (read more)

Steve Anderson shared: “Whilst dismantling a scanner (destined for conversion into an axis of a laser etcher) I happened across a neat little lens which, when placed in front of my phone camera, makes a rather lovely macro lens…” (read more)

Markus Keil shared: “My first PCB’s that I routed by myself has been delivered. They look pretty good. They were made by PCB Center in Germany. Assembled pics later when I’ve put it together.” (read more)

Zviad Sulaberidze shared: “some acetone and #inmoov printed parts” (read more)

Curtis Brooks shared: “Here’s a prototype for my new quad heating controller design. It has four separate thermocouple sensors, I2C I/O expanders, a RTC, SD card, USB, bluetooth or XBee wireless and a interface for a I2C LCD/keypad. I designed the controller for my reflow oven however, it can also serve as a brew-controller, smoker controller, etc. the board is programmed using the Arduino environment. More information can be found at hobbybotics.com.” (read more)

Alex McNair shared: “Mr. Coffee timer and an outlet combined makes a handy timed outlet for almost anything you can think of. I use it to charge my Nexus 7 tablet so that it begins to charge two hours before I wake. The Mr. Coffee timer stays on for two hours whether you activate it directly or use the timer. I guess the thing is a clock, too.” (read more)

Chris Osborn shared: “So very close to getting the Commodore 64 communicating with the Raspberry Pi over the IEC serial bus. Right after I send back the first byte though the C64 quits and says “FILE NOT FOUND” and doesn’t let me send the rest of the data” (read more)

Community Projects from the Adafruit Blog

The New Hobbyist shared his OpenSCAD setup, Using Sublime Text Editor, plus helpful plugins: “I just recently started using Sublime Text 2 as my primary editor and I’ve got to say it’s really a great addition to my work flow. Not only does it have a clean look and all the features you would expect from a modern editor, but it also has some pretty crazy stuff like a built in package manager! With just a few keystrokes you can search to see if you have syntax highlighting for a particular language installed, pull up the package manager, and install it. All in a matter of seconds. It’s pretty awesome.” (read more)

A maker dad sets to work repairing (and improving) a broken toy and shares his process of 3D printing replacement parts for it: “This is one of those really cheap toys that makes more noise that it actually does things. It has only 1 motor at the back, the front wheels don’t even touch the ground and to turn it actually goes backwards which blocks one wheel and allows only the other one to move, hence always turning in the same direction (this is sooooo annoying ! ). Anyhow, as any father that has nothing else to do and was looking for an excuse to do something with my underused 3D printer, I set up on fixing it….” (read more)

Chris Fenton shared an awesome 3D printed project: “Have you ever been sitting there, quietly computing something and thinking to yourself, “If only this process were somehow billions of times slower, less reliable, and involved lots of physical labor”? If so, the Turbo Entabulator is the machine you’ve been looking for! While I get to spend my days working on one of the world’s fastest computers, I like to relax when I get home . . . slow things down a little. You could say I like to enjoy both ends of the computing spectrum. After my success with the FIBIAC project, an electromechanical beast chugging along at nearly one micro-operation-per-second, I opted to go even slower with this one. I also wanted to try my hand at something a little more mechanical. The result is a nearly-entirely 3D-printed, entirely-mechanical computer (for the purists out there, yes, I used lots of nuts & bolts, a handful of springs, rubber bands, and a dozen or so tiny bearings). I even printed out the punch-cards!” (read more)

Nathan shared:”After going to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California and seeing some there, I just had to incorporate it into a project. I designed the pattern in Illustrator and Photoshop, then uploaded it to Spoonflower for printing. I love that it’s an interesting enough abstract pattern on its own to still be attractive to someone who doesn’t know what it is, but if someone does recognize it then there’s a new level of geeky coolness.” (read more)

Amazing costume! The Golden Dragon – The Last Daimyo seeking Samurai.
(read more)

Check out the Earth Structural Layer Cake: “A little while ago, my sister approached me with an idea. She’s doing an education degree, and her and her friends had to give a series of lessons on the geological sciences to a class of primary school kids. One of their lessons involved teaching the kids about the structure of the Earth. One of her friends came up with the idea of presenting a model of the Earth made out of cake. So my sister asked me if I could make a spherical cake with all the layers of the Earth inside it.” (read more)

Patrick Schless shared: “I bought an antique telegraph sounder a while back, and I’ve been working on a project that will click out emails from my Etsy store when I get an order. I’ve gone through several generations, and come up with something I really like. What follows is a description of my process for going from concept to finished piece. The code & PCB are open-source, and can be found on my github.” (read more)

talk2bruce shared Groovin’ Grover: A Microcontroller-based Marionette: “Groovin’ Grover is a marionette manipulated by four hobby servos and a Pololu Maestro microcontroller-based servo controller. You can control each of Grover’s limbs independently and make him walk, wave, and most entertaining – make him dance. Groovin’ Grover is easy to assemble and wire up. The Maestro Servo microcontroller is easy to program using free software from Pololu.”(read more)

Check out this great project shared by Paul in the Adafruit Support Forums: “Thanks for all the help. I ended up using the 24v DC converter/power supply. It worked very well with the solenoid pulling on one end of a stick holding the door open. I had to work on the door to get it to close and latch properly. Here are pics of the final rig (overview, & control center), plus a pic of my cat Stella, safely at home.” (read more)

Kevin Cuzner added a Pi SPI driver to his AVRdude fork! “My hope is that things like this will allow the Raspberry Pi to be used to explore further embedded development for those who want to get into microcontrollers, but blew all their money on the Raspberry Pi. Also, in keeping with the purpose that the Raspberry Pi was originally designed for, using it like this makes it fairly simple for people in educational surroundings to expand into different aspects of small computer and embedded device programming.” (read more)

Bob Snyder shared his RPi controlled electric gate build: “We thought we could allow the opening and closing of the gate from a web page served up on their LAN. We added the ability to automatically lock open the gate (this requires you to press the remote control button before the gate is fully opened.) We add the ability to turn on and off the light at the gate. We also added a fan to the box to help keep the Pi as cool as possible during the hot summer months.” (read more)

john biehler shared: “After seeing this Instructable about controlling the Eggbot with a Raspberry Pi, it seemed like a great thing to bring to MakerFaire. I had a small LCD screen handy (although it’s pretty low res) so it should work perfect for computerless demos and not take up too much space.” (read more)

Dave Akerman put together a high altitude camera set up using a hot air balloon and custom RPi camera enclosure: “Back in March I built a lightweight Raspberry Pi tracker comprising a model A Pi and a pre-production Pi camera built into a foam replica of the Raspberry Pi logo. The aim was to send images from higher than my record of just under 40km, so the tracker was pretty much as light as I could make it. A launch was planned in April but but the wind predictions back then were poor for such a flight with a “landing” out to sea. That was the flight with Eben and Liz from the Raspberry Pi foundation, so rather than lose a precious slot in their over-full diaries I decided to launch a “floater” which was eventually lost over Switzerland and is probably still in hiding somewhere in France. For that I made a more suitable payload box, keeping the original for a later date.” (read more)

NYC Resistor shared: “1930′s Teletype USB interface. Both the high voltage and the custom baud rate issues are a bit cumbersome, so I thought there must be a better way. USB ports will output about 5 W, so I figured that would be close enough to drive the magnet if I could produce sufficiently high voltage. Using Adafruit’s boost converter calculator, I came up with some rough numbers and built a circuit that handles both the slow baud rate and voltage required to interface with the teletype” (read more)

From our friends at Ambro! “We ran well this weekend. Finished 5th overall out of 16 racers in the class. Jack was the youngest. Age bracket was 10 years – 17 years. Happy to have Adafruit on board!” (read more)

slickstreamer shared: “The new CSI camera module for the raspberry pi make it posible to stream high-definition video without having problem with performance. Streaming with ffmpeg will use about 2-4% and raspivid 1-2% of the CPU.” (read more)

Flag Day (United States).

In the United States, Flag Day is celebrated on June 14. It commemorates the adoption of the flag of the United States, which happened on that day in 1777 by resolution of the Second Continental Congress. The United States Army also celebrates the Army Birthday on this date; Congress adopted “the American continental army” after reaching a consensus position in the Committee of the Whole on June 14, 1775.

Cubehero has a cool post celebrating today:

Happy Flag Day! June 14th is an American holiday that celebrates its flag. Usually, this isn’t a major holiday, but I thought it’d be interesting to make a flag for Flag Day. I remembered there was something called the Cicada Design Principle, that I wanted to try, and I thought I’d apply it to making non-repeating waves to a flag.
The Cicada Design Principle is a way to make seamless non-repeating backgrounds (for all intents and purposes) with just a few parts and some prime numbers.

Check out Talking Lamp by haasebert a short 6 second film for the Adafruit #adafruit6secs electronic film festival (Youtube playlist here for all the entries on YouTube).

NEW PRODUCTS – USB DIY Connector Shell – Type Mini-B & USB DIY Connector Shell – Type A Socket. Make your own USB connections without slicing apart a USB cable and soldering those thin wires inside. These DIY “USB shells” are available in USB A plug, micro B, mini B and USB A socket.

These are super handy!

In stock and shipping now.

NEW PRODUCT – Inductive Charging Set – 5V @ 500mA max. Inductive charging is a way of powering a device without a direct wire connection. Most people have seen inductive charging in a rechargable electric toothbrush: you may have noticed that you recharge it by placing it into the holder, but there’s no direct plug. These chargers work by taking a power transformer and splitting it in half, an AC waveform is generated into one, and couples into the second coil.

This is a basic charger set, and it does work, providing 5V DC output from the output half when the input half is powered with 9V to 12VDC. You can draw as much as ~500mA if the coils are 2 or 3 mm apart. If you only need 100 or 200mA you can be up 7mm apart. For 10mA draw, the coils can be up to half an inch (12.5mm) apart. Any non-ferrous/non-conductive material (eg air, wood, leather, plastic, paper, glass) can be used between the two coils. The material doesn’t affect the distance or efficiency. The coils do need to be fairly co-axial, try to get them to be parallel and have the circles line up for best power-transfer. (This is why the electric toothbrush must fit into the plastic holder, it’s lining up the two coils for best efficiency)

Because its an air-core transformer, it’s fairly inefficient. Only about 40% of the energy in shows up on the other end, but for low power or charging project. If you draw 5V 100mA on the output side (0.5W), you’ll need 0.5W * 2.5 / 9V = ~150mA from the input end. The quiescent current is about 70mA at all time, even when the other coil is not anywhere near by.

These are basic modules, probably used for some low cost toy. We don’t have any datasheets or specifications for them. We do see a feedback resistor divider on the output side using 0603 SMT resistors so an advanced user could solder in different values to turn it into a 3.3V output.

• Coils are 1.5″/38mm diameter
• Receiver weight: 5.5g
• Transmitter weight 5.7g

In stock and shipping now!

While I’m less and less allergic to float where performance is concerned, it does and always will have a significant precision problem since float is inherently ‘lossy’.  When precision and performance matter with decimal values, there’s still no substitute for fixed point math.  Using Fixed-Point Math for Embedded Applications by Steve Hageman has a lot of excellent advice on getting the most out of your MCU for the least amount of work, and contains some generally excellent tips for signal capture and manipulation.

NEW PRODUCT – FLORA Budget Pack. Get started with the fabulous Adafruit Flora platform with this lovely budget kit, just enough to get you started with this fun wearable computer. Included are enough parts to make your first wearable electronic project. There’s a Flora motherboard, four ultra-bright chainable RGB pixels, a 3xAAA battery holder and batteries, a battery extension cable, our high quality stainless steel thread, alligator clips to help you test out your parts and connections and a USB cable for reprogramming the Flora. Over $55 worth of goodies, for under $45.

• FLORA main board
• Four Flora RGB NeoPixels V2
• 3xAAA Battery holder with JST connector and on/off switch
• Stainless Medium Conductive Thread – 3 ply – 18 meter/60 ft
• Needle set with 20 pieces
• Small Alligator Clip Test Lead (set of 12)
• USB cable – A/MiniB – 3ft
• 4x Alkaline AAA batteries

We guarantee lots of safe sewing fun!

In stock and shipping now.

MechaSolution – Korea.

Micro Tesseract Enterprise – Malaysia.

These are just 2 of our distributors in the Asia region, make sure to visit the Adafruit distributor page to view all! We will be spotlighting Adafruit resellers from around the world on a regular basis!

We recently updated our distributor, reseller and hackerspace pricing! Now, 1 quantity has UP TO a 30% discount off many items, this is allows you to get a great discount by just ordering 1 of something. Great for folks who just want to try 1 item of each of something out in their store, etc. As always, once you order 50+ or more of something the discount goes UP TO 40% off many items as well. Note! *Not ALL items have reseller pricing, reseller pricing is for items we can discount for our resellers. We are adding more all the time! Remember, the minimum order is $250 per order, not including shipping.

We have a very easy reseller program and would love to have more great people & companies as a distributors/resellers/hackerspaces. Our products are high-quality and we think they’re the best engineered & designed in the market. How can you be a distributor? Just fill our form here, keep in mind the following questions!

1. Are you an online store, a physical store or a hackerspace that would like to distribute our products? Please include a link.
2. Can you place orders $250 and over (Not including shipping) each time?
3. Can you pay via paypal or credit card? For international large orders, can you pay via wire transfer?
4. Do you have a UPS account? (This is not required, but helpful).

We’ll be adding more features for resellers in 2013 enjoy! To become a distributor, click here.

Great work, Eric! (He’s @alpine_swift on Twitter.)

Related Adafruit Tutorials

Raspberry Pi E-mail Notifier Using LEDs Prepare Python: Raspberry Pi’s popularity make things so easy that it is almost scary. I set forth on a simple starter project of having the raspberry pi show me when new gmail messages arrive. After some searching it seems that lots of people are already talking about how to do this and there are some great examples. Michael over at MitchTech had the most ready to go code which I pilfered from. Adafruits Cobbler Breakout Kit makes the bread board experience even easier with the clearly labeled pins for each of raspi’s GPIOs. (read more)

Adafruit 16×2 Character LCD + Keypad for Raspberry Pi: This new Adafruit Pi Plate makes it easy to use an RGB 16×2 Character LCD. We really like the RGB Character LCDs we stock in the shop. Unfortunately, these LCDs do require quite a few digital pins, 6 to control the LCD and then another 3 to control the RGB backlight for a total of 9 pins. With this in mind, we wanted to make it easier for people to get these LCD into their projects so we devised a Pi plate 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 R-Pi! (read more)

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.

We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!

OpenSprinkler Interval Program is now available for OSPi. Via rayshobby.net.

Good news to the OpenSprinkler Pi users: the same interval program firmware that runs on the latest OpenSprinkler has now been ported to OpenSprinkler Pi! This is due entirely to the generous contributions by Dan Kimberling, who ported the OpenSprinkler’s Arduino code to Python. The code is available for download at:

• Interval program demo for OpenSprinkler Pi

Visit here for instructions how to setup your Raspberry Pi for OSPi.

Check out IV-11 VFD Tube Clock by Haris Andrianakis a short 6 second film for the Adafruit #adafruit6secs electronic film festival (Youtube playlist here for all the entries on YouTube).

After it’s built, using it is easy-as-pie. First, plug the Ethernet cable into any Internet provider in your home, work, hotel or conference/event. Next, power up the Pi with the micro USB cable to your laptop or to the wall adapter. The Pi will boot up and create a new secure wireless access point called Onion Pi. Connecting to that access point will automatically route any web browsing from your computer through the anonymizing Tor network.

This pack comes with everything you need, $108 of parts for $95 and we’ll donate a portion of each sale to the Tor foundation!

Each order comes with:

• Raspberry Pi Model B – has an Ethernet port, two USB ports and 512 MB of RAM
• Adafruit Pi Case – Keeps your Pi cozy and safe
• WiFi adapter with antenna – Plenty of range, this will be how you connect to the Pi proxy
• 10 foot Ethernet cable – connect this from your Pi to a router with Internet service
• MicroUSB cable – 3 feet long, great for powering your Pi
• 5V 1A power adapter – specially designed for the Pi
• USB console cable – good for debugging and setting up your Pi when running it without a monitor/keyboard
• 4 GB SD Card with Wheezy – a 4GB card with Raspbian 7 already installed.

The Onion Pi logo shown above for display only, it’s not a sticker or included!

You’ll still need to set up the access point and Tor software according to our tutorial. This project is best used by people with a little bit of command-line, linux or Raspberry Pi experience. If you’ve set up a Raspberry Pi and configured it before, this project will be a fun experience. We have tons of tutorials for exploring Raspberry Pi in the Adafruit Learning System

Please note! This is a new project and there may be updates and improvements over time!

In stock and anonymizing!

Ben Heck is working on a rather elegant portable Raspberry Pi gaming rig!

Ben gets to work on a Raspberry Pi gaming device you can take anywhere. In part one Ben gets the electronics working and installs MAME on the Raspberry Pi.

UPDATE: And follow up with Part 2 here!

Read More.

Automated programming and testing jig built with Raspberry Pi, via hackaday.

Doug Jackson makes word clocks, and he must be doing quite a bit of business. We say that because he put together a programming and test bed for the clock circuit boards.

This is a great example to follow if you’re doing any kind of volume assembly. The jig lets the populated PCB snap into place, making all the necessary electrical connections. This was made possible by a package of goods he picked up on eBay which included rubber spacers to separate the board from the acrylic mounting plate, pogo pins to make the electrical connections, and a spring-loaded board clamp seen to the left in this image.

The switch in the lower right connects power to the board and pulls a Raspberry Pi GPIO pin high. The Python script running on the RPi polls that pin, executing a bash script which programs the ATmega169 microcontroller using the GPIO version of AVRdude. We looked through his Python script and didn’t see code for testing the boards. But the image above shows a “Passed” message on the screen that isn’t in his script. We would wager he has another version that takes the hardware through a self test routine….

Read more at hackaday.com.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.

We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!