SparkFun Electronics - News

Quarter Million Widgets and Counting

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0100

SparkFun has produced a quarter million widgets! We built our 250,000 widget sometime last week. Some people are surprised to hear that we test every single unit. Yep. On top of that, production is currently working at greater than 98% success rates. They're killing it! Beat that, Apple.

Pete Lewis has posted a new tutorial on testing with bed-of-nails and pogo pins to show the world how SparkFun does it. We didn't take this class in college, so we're really just making it up as we go along. We hope you can learn something from it!

Remember, creating a widget is just a small part of the process. Figuring out how to build it quickly and test it efficiently is over half the battle.

Genius Boyfriend

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Here's a great story, submitted via the feedback form from Ryan, a SparkFun customer:

Several months ago I started dating a lovely girl from the next town over. Things went very well from the start, with one exception - she, being afraid of the dark, cannot sleep without the TV on, and I, being easily entertained and distracted, cannot sleep with the TV on. After a bit of disagreement, she proposed that I ought to purchase a night-light, and that might solve the problem. I asked her what kind of a night-light she had in mind, and she mentioned that it would be extremely cool to have a blue one.

Having just seen the killer blue LEDs on sale at Sparkfun, my brain starting spinning. I could purchase a boring, mass-produced night-light at the neighborhood grocery store for two dollars, or I could spend quite a bit more and order some fun new goodies from Sparkfun and design an LED-powered night-light from scratch.

Needless to say, I chose the latter. I purchased a fresh, new bread-board, some components, a bag full of those great LEDs, a few different proto-boards, new spools of wire and a few other odds and ends. Several days later, I spread it all out on my workbench and ended up creating what has got to be the most expensive, but certainly one of the most awesome, night-lights ever.

The circuit itself is dirt-simple, DC circuits 101 kind of stuff, but it works spectacularly, looks great, does an amazing job of lighting up a room, and has ended all disagreements about the TV.

...Plus, now my girlfriend thinks I'm some kind of genius. I showed her the schematic and insisted that it's the most basic of all kid stuff electronics, but she still thinks it's amazing.

Here's a link to the gallery of pictures I took of the project at various build stages: http://homepage.mac.com/geosword/PhotoAlbum17.html

Thank you a hundred million times Sparkfun! Your products and service absolutely rock, and I look very forward to the next thing that you and I build together. :)

Regards, Ryan

You rock Ryan! Thank you so much for sharing your story! I wish we could all look so valiant in front of our loved ones. I am more likely to get a 'you're crazy' look as opposed to a 'you're a genius' look. Our hat is off to you sir!

The Flood of New

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0100

If you're in the Denver/Boulder area and you're interested in the IEEE and automation, there's a new IEEE/Robotics society forming! Matt Taylor and Sam Siewert (one of my old university professors, oddly enough) asked us to pass the word on. The meeting is this Wednesday (7/1/09) at 7PM on the CU campus.

There's a class tonight! Napkin Schematics is the first class of the 6 week course. All are welcome to attend. We are going to try to broadcast the show live, as well as record it for later editing and posting. Check the class page for more information.

I get excited about simple things. But when Aaron came to me a few weeks back and mentioned that we should carry RF adapters - I wasn't entirely convinced. Who cares about adapting SMA to RPSMA? But as we started to talk, he showed me just how confusing it can be. He wrote a short and sweet tutorial to explain the confusing state of SMA RF connectors. Well done Aaron!

These are the two RF adapters that convert between reverse polarized SMA, normal SMA, shrouded SMA, inner nut RPSMA, whatever. It's quite weird and hard to explain, so be sure to check Aaron's SMA tutorial with nice, clean pictures.

Speaking of new stuff, we've got a lot rolling out:

We took some of our favorite bits and pieces and created an Arduino Starter Kit. The great thing about this kit is that it includes all the parts you need to hack for a significant amount of time, without anything else. We put it together as sort of an answer to the question: 'What would I give my niece/nephew/son/daughter/friend to get started with microcontrollers?' Kit includes some good inputs (linear pot, 12mm button), good outputs (LEDs, tri-color LED, buzzer), and sensors (light sensor, vibration sensor). Happy hacking.

A new breakout board for the MAX7456 is now available. This simple to use IC gives the user the ability to throw text over a video stream. Also called on-screen display (OSD) or text overlay, the MAX7456 has an SPI interface and makes it easy hook up to PAL or NTSC TVs or larger displays with an RCA type input.

Another slick little breakout board for a different IC: The AD9835 is a compact signal generator with extremely good accuracy up to 50MHz!

Speaking of Analog Devices - this is the new ADXL335, small, low-power, triple axis accelerometer. I got the chance to take a tour of the Analog Devices' fabrication plant in Cambridge, MA. I was blown away to find out that the world's supply of MEMs accelerometers and gyros from Analog Devices are fabbed in the two lower floors of a non-descript brick building in the heart of Boston, a few streets from MIT. Weird. The nice folks in the MEMs sensor group gave me a tour and took me out to lunch. Thanks ADI!

The SD Sniffer is a device that was recommended by a SparkFun customer. It's pretty simple, yet very helpful. It's a breakout board that allows you to hook an SD card into an SD socket, and expose the signal pins so that you can listen in on the data signals, SD traffic, electrical levels, whatever.

Dale Wheat is just such a neat guy, and his kits are so simple and cool, we just couldn't say no. We now carry the tinyCylon and Lux Spectralis kits. These kits are a quick, simple build and do one thing well - amaze people with LED blinking goodness.

After much beating our heads against a wall, we landed a deal with Extech to resell their excellent bench power supplies. These are not cheap supplies, these are good DC power supplies. We especially like the slim-line 80W DC switcher, but it's also the most expensive...

The GE864 is Telit's next step into miniaturization of a quad-band cellular module. Telit is the highest quality cellular module manufacturer on the market. The GE864 continues this trend with more great AT commands. You can effectively power this unit up, send it some serial AT commands, and start piping webpage and data information over the cellular network. Nifty.

The PICAXE USB Programmer is effectively the same thing as the PICAXE USB Programming Cable. The difference is this board has two on-board LEDs to show the serial data (TX and RX) being passed back and forth. Why buy this board? Because blinky things are better.

Books! Sometimes it just makes a lot more sense to have a printed thing in front of you. These two books dovetail well together. On the left, we have Getting Started with Arduino by Arduino's playboy (and co-creater) Massimo Banzi . It is a good beginner's book to Arduino and general circuit hacking. On the right is Making Things Talk written by ITP's playboy (and prolific spokesperson) Tom Igoe. Making Things Talk is a more advanced book that shows how to hook various systems and components (like Bluetooth, force sensors, and monkeys) together.

A photo gate is a great thing to have. Whether you're detecting food pellets for mice during a controlled experiment, or you're using it as a safety stop for a printer head, these IR gates will help you detect the world around you.

The 555 Timer is a very old staple of circuits and electrical engineering. While I jump on the chance to use a microcontroller any chance I get, there are still many good uses for this work horse. Being able to drive 200mA is just one of the many neat features of this timing chip.

You will need a resistor at some point in your project. It's really annoying whenever you don't have the right one. This resistor kit will have the right resistor. As SparkFun user Quazar points out, there's 365 - one for every day of the year!

Triple A batteries are a staple for many small projects. We now sell good quality AAAs.

And for the final new widget on the list, we have a 6A DC to DC converter module. 6 amps! This little guy takes 4.5V to 14V and with great efficiency, outputs a regulated 0.6V to 5.5V. Output voltage is set with an external resistor and capacitor.

Infrastructure Woes

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Sorry for the long delay in homepage posts. We've been just slammed with projects, orders, fun stuff, award ceremonies, and some infrastructure issues.

Now don't get confused - the webpage you are currently looking at is hosted on two boxes located somewhere in the world. We're not entirely sure where. These colo'd servers have a giant pipe to the interweb, with good airconditioning and big backup batteries for power. They should never go down. The internet connection to the SparkFun office building is a bit of a different story...

We out grew our 1.5Mbps synchronous T1 about 8 months ago (~$400 per month).
We added a DSL backup around January that got us around 5.5Mbps down (woot!) and 0.7Mbps up (ugh) for ~$125 (woot!). That lasted us another 5 months before things really started to bind up in May/June.

Over the past few weeks we broke the 60 employee mark! Yay! At the same time, our connection to the internet has suffered greatly. Lots of time outs. Lots of bribing the IT guys. Lots of stress. We've scrambled to upgrade our connection to 10Mbps synchronous (yea!) using Qwest metro optical ethernet (QMOE - ~$1500 a month, ugh), but ran into some major delays. We need a fix today, and Qwest told us 60-90 days! So while we are patiently waiting (and trying to sweet talk anyone we can at QWEST), we found yet another solution called SkyBeam. SkyBeam saved our ass. We called on Monday and I think they had a small rectangular box (it looks like a 2.4GHz WiFi dish) on the top of our building on Wednesday. On top of that, the little dish (pointed at the Colorado foothills) is 2Mpbs synchronous, which is faster than anything we currently have, and is only $195 per month!

It's amazing how much it hurts to have slow internet - possibly worse than no internet. Thank you SkyBeam and thank you SparkFun IT for getting us back our internet fix.