SparkFun ELECTRONICS Log In  |  Order Tracking
  0 items in your cart
 
PRODUCTS
New ProductsNew Products
Top SellersTop Sellers
Featured ProductsFeatured Products
FeedbackFeedback
CUSTOM SERVICES
Custom Enclosure Design
Custom PCBs
Open Circuits
Display prices in:

 
News RSS | New Products RSS | News Archive
May 12, 2008
SparkFun Rubik's Cube
SparkFun fan Patricio Sthandier created this sweet looking product proposal:
http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/news/sparkrubik.jpg
Beautiful. Maybe I could use it to drive the RuBot back into its former job of hunting humans.
May 7, 2008
Maker Faire and New Stuff
Maker Faire 2008 was another extremely entertaining event. We got to catch up with lots of current customers (you guys rock) and met many new friends.
http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/news/MakerFaire-2008-1-S.jpg
This is how my Maker Faire started. We had a spring snow storm here in Boulder.
http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/news/MakerFaire-2008-5-S.jpg
Chris is showing off the bottom of the SparkFun LED light table during setup at the Faire. Chris wired up 64 RGB matrices (a total of 4096 tri-color LEDs) and 4 OEM Atari Joysticks to create a 4-player cooperative pong game. Very awesome. It used something like 13 amps when everything was on.
http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/news/MakerFaire-2008-6-S.jpg
This is a shot of one of the Crude Awakening pieces on display. They were beautiful pieces and fit nicely into the Maker layout.
http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/news/MakerFaire-2008-8-S.jpg
Good bye cheese. That's a real safe - very very heavy safe. Another one of my favorites was the life size game of mouse trap. The size and amount of inertia behind this system was mind blowing. When the safe hit the ground, the earth shook and the crowd roared.
http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/news/MakerFaire-2008-20-S.jpg
Yea SparkFun booth. Working hard or hardly working? Pong was very popular. High score was around 64. We also had the infamous Rotary Phone, Tetris, and some good blinky things to show off. No Nintendo Controller this year...
http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/news/MakerFaire-2008-50-S.jpg
We finished off this years Maker Faire with a hike up to Coit Tower at night. San Francisco is great! What mystified us is the presence of the Christopher Columbus statue in front of the tower - he never made it anywhere near California!

Congratulations if you've made it this far! Here's the new stuff:

You've GOT to have a good pair of wire strippers. We couldn't find a good supplier, so we had our own made. These are great quality and go down to 30AWG for stripping wire wrap wire. And they're extremely affordable!

The AVR-GSM is a beast of a board. Olimex has combined a low-cost cellular GSM module with a creative Atmel platform for remote monitoring and sensing. Neat little board.

We added a 10mm snap to the LilyPad category. These smaller magnetic snaps are great for quick disconnects on batteries and wearable devices.

This is a very small GPS receiver call the GPS Stick. Design to enable GPS on laptops and small computing platforms, we just liked the small form factor and price. Great for hacking.

Added the Series 2.5 XBee module with Wire antenna. XBee is a great unit if you just need to get serial data from one point to many. It's low cost and easy to use.

We now carry replacement elements for our hot-air rework stations. These elements are the key to maintaining hot-air tools. It's like a hair-dryer, with more umph. Checkout the hot-air tutorials as well.

We added some example pictures of our laser module mount. This plastic device holds our low-cost laser solidly in place.

See you at Maker Faire Austin!
May 1, 2008
Maker Faire and XBee
http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/news/MakerFaire-S.jpg
We'll be at Maker Faire in San Mateo. Come visit us!

We'll have a demo of our new MP3 Development Platform.

We now carry the XBee Series 2.5 modules and the Pro version of the Series 1. Find the module to enable your next wireless project.
April 29, 2008
Insanity of Scale

We accidentally stepped on an SD card, and what we found inside mystifies me.
http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/news/SD2.jpg
Wait - that looks like a micro SD card! Why in the world...
The back reads:
5123ACA-7A KOR
S VHL463PA 704
http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/news/SD1.jpg
Crazy. Someone took a magic marker to every microSD card (under marker reads '512MB MMCmicro'), and then hand soldered them onto a small PCB to create a larger SD card. Talk about economies of scale. There must have been a huge batch of microSD cards and a perceived shortage of full size SD cards? I can't explain it. Why in the world would one pay money to solder these things together when a microSD to SD adapter ships free of charge with every microSD card? The micro card size looks a bit off. Maybe it was ill formed MMC cards and they wanted to salvage the memory so they made SD cards out of the micro cards. We will probably never know.
April 28, 2008
TrampoLine Musical Instrument
The image “http://www.surek.co.uk/trampoline/pics/IMG_8285.JPG” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Cass emailed us about an interesting, nicely polished, new musical instrument created by a student team in the United Kingdom.

http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/news/Trampoline1.jpg
The TrampoLine uses an accelerometer, the Arduino Stamp, and a very creative suspension system to create an ingenius input device. As embedded electronics get easier to use, it's wonderful to see new users coming up with great new applications!
View All Page   1 |  2 |  3 |  4 |  5  ... » 
©2005 SparkFun, all rights reserved. Privacy and Security
Custom Services Tutorials Support Forums Abour Us Contact Us