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News - SparkFun Tours ThinkGeek | about 6 months ago

As far as similar companies go: https://www.inventables.com/ They have neat stuff to help with small projects, but not a lot of electrical stuff yet. There’s a little bit of overlap but not much.

Product PRT-09011 | about a year ago

FYI, I’m using this part on a PCB I’m making for school. Haven’t made the board yet, but judging from the gerber files, the footprint in the Eagle library doesn’t really match. If you look at the part, the two feet on the outside are power and ground and are spaced slightly further away from the two differentials on the inside. I presume so you can run wider traces to them to handle 500mA.
So…don’t trust the footprint in the Sparkfun Eagle Library, because after laying the actual part on top of a 1:1 print out of the gerber file, the feet don’t quite line up.

News - AVC Update | about a year ago

Also try the Avery Tap Room and the Mountain Sun and Southern Sun(Mountain’s on Pearl Str. and Southern is south on Broadway I believe).

Product COM-10262 | about a year ago

I have a strip of RGB’s similar to this. Can you snip the ribbon at any point?
The ones I have let you cut the strip at certain intervals and have pads where you can solder on wires.

News - Thursday New Product Post | about a year ago

The LCD screen and a bunch of the of other hardware IS from sparkfun, though…

News - Thursday New Product Post | about a year ago

this (http://www.flickr.com/photos/7167520@N07/5248885013/) is what I ended up doing with some RGB LED strips I found.
I didn’t know that Sparkfun sold them at the time…

News - Free Day Bite-Sized Tutor… | about a year ago

I also have that book and it does a great job of explaining how components work and what kind of applications they have.

Many engineers have theoretical knowledge, but when it comes to implementing the theory, they have no clue what kinds of parts are available or where to find them.

Tutorial - Number System Conversions | about a year ago

the notation will be determined by the compiler that you’re using. For example, Freescale’s software CodeWarrior defaults to decimal if no prefix or suffix is added. Hexidecimal is indicated by adding ‘$’ as a prefix, binary by adding ‘b’ as a suffix, and decimal by adding ’t' as a suffix. That’s for freescale assembly, I assume the C notation would be the same.

A tutorial on binary math would be very useful…

News - Bite-size Datasheet Tutor… | about 2 years ago

I’ve just come to accept that a datasheet isn’t going to be easy to read. Half of the time, the datasheet is just a sales sheet that talks about the features of the product and what the different product numbers mean. You have to contact the manufacturer directly to get a real datasheet.

Good intuition is always useful as well. I was adding an Altera FPGA to a PCB and was reading through all the documentation. Altera was recommending decoupling capacitors in the ‘mF’. I remarked to my mentor that I’d never heard of decoupling caps in the millifarads, seemed large. At the design review, one of the engineers asked why the decoupling caps were so large, and we all found out that in the documentation for that particular FPGA, Altera chose to use ‘mF’ to mean microfarad.

News - Communities that Create | about 2 years ago

Just wanted to say thanks for trying to educate people.
I’m taking a microcontroller class at the moment and I put in a big order to Sparkfun at the beginning of the semester – 7 segment displays, the extra-fancy LCD screen, LEDs, etc.
When the TAs come by to grade my lab projects, they always comment on how nice my hardware is. The big 7 segments really came in handy since I could plug them into my bread board vertically where the leads weren’t shorted to each other. Everyone else had these little, hard to read 7 segs that you have to plug in horizontally and rotate the whole bread board to read them.
Starting senior design next semester and I’ll probably be putting in a few more large orders…