Our friends down at Club Workshop in Denver are hosting a Make Meetup this Thursday. Come meet other Makers, see their projects, and discuss your project ideas.
Engineer Pete wrote a nice tutorial on how to use the Ardubot PCB with an Arduino USB board. In the tutorial, check out the Annoyatron, Ardubot's predecessor and troublesome older sibling.
The moment you all have been waiting for, the evaluation boards for the extremely powerful and tiny Venus GPS module are finally posted. One is a logger complete with SPI flash and a LiPo battery attachment, the other is a general evaluation board. Keep in mind, they are selling really fast, but rest assured we will be building many more.
New Smart Outlet Powerline modems are now available. Now you can seamlessly integrate control over your powerlines using these enclosed devices. It seems new powerline modems are showing up every few weeks, so keep an eye on the current sensor category and our RSS product feed.
By popular demand, we now sell a 5V version of the FTDI Basic. Now you can easily communicate with all 5V Arduinos without having to modify the 3.3V FTDI Basic.
Here is a great 4 digit 7 segment LED with a common cathode configuration. Will work great for a clock.
How many Arduinos do you have sitting around? How long do your development electronics last and what kind of impact do they have on the environment? Here is an interesting blog about the life cycle of the Arduino USB (Duemilanove).
Our customers like 4 new arcade style buttons so much like me :)Thank you Sparkfun
Clear, Lighted arcade push buttons would be most cool.
Suggestion,
Use your COM-08769 switch on the FTDI Basic board to make the voltage selectable, 5v or 3.3v
Any plans for evaluation boards for the Venus GPS with a chip antenna, or does that pose a problem? Thanks!
SkyTraq has warned against using small passive GPS chip antennas due to decreased SNR. So far SkyTraq and SparkFun have not heard of any customers using passive chip antennas successfully with the Venus. However, we are still working on a chip antenna solution, because a small Venus board would just be awesome.
Cool! It would be great to see more arcade gear and mechanical things in general on sparkfun.
Please get Concave Buttons too. Also are they microswitch buttons (with a click) or leaf buttons (smooth)?
Cool! Good feedback. I'll keep my eyes open.
The arcade buttons are pretty much mash proof. They don't have a 'click', just a mechanical limit. The big button uses a microswitch, though you can't really feel it.
I would have though that you would also have the buttons in 'Sparkfun Red'
The pics show the legs coming out from under the button. That tells me these are microswitch.