New Product Friday: Sassy Chassis
New Products! Today we have a slick new chassis, motors, and an awesome preorder for Particle's new Photon IoT board.
It's Friday and that means New Products. We are really excited to show you this "shadowy" new addition to our catalog. Let's check out the video and see what we've got this week!
Classic Rob. Hopefully we were able to convey just how simple it is to assemble and use the Shadow Chassis.
The Shadow Chassis is a marvelously durable and modular robot platform from RobotZone. The chassis plates and mounts are cut from ABS plastic and utilize the Actobotics hub patterns for sensors, controllers, power, etc. Simply snap each panel together and you'll be able to attach your motors and favorite robotics controller. With the included "snap on” micro-controller mounts, you can attach an Arduino, Raspberry Pi, SparkFun RedBoard, or SparkFun RedBot Mainboard! This kit even has a mounting hole for a standard size servo as well as a 4xAA battery holder with barrel jack termination.
This pair of Hobby Gearmotors are the exact motors we recommended for use in the Shadow Chassis. With these banana yellow motors you'll be offered a cheap and easy-to-use setup to get your wheels turning at a speed of up to 140 RPM unloaded.
Last up this week, we are starting to take preorders for Particle's new Photon Kit. Two weeks ago we released the product line for the module. Now you will be able to save your spot in line for this brand spanking new IoT device!
Particle's Internet of Things hardware development kit, the Photon, provides everything you need to build a connected project. Particle combines a powerful 120Mhz ARM Cortex M3 micro-controller with a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip in a tiny thumbnail-sized module called the PØ (P-zero). The Photon Kit includes a Photon with headers, a shiny white mini-breadboard, a USB-micro cable, and a couple of extra surprises to help you start building right away.
That's all for this week, folks. Check back next week and we might just have something that utilizes the new Shadow Chassis to a further extent. We'll see you then, have fun with the suspense!
If the surprise is "The (Shadowy) return of the RedBot", Shadow's assembly guide gave the game away :)
We didn't try very hard to conceal this ;-)
The prominence given to the sound-absorption panels is cracking me up. I'm also greatly appreciative of their existence. Thanks for responding to viewer (I mean "listener") comments!
Sadly, we viewers can never be satisfied...
Might I offer the observation that, despite the new acoustic treatments, there is still quite a lot of short-period echo in the audio stream. :( Since the panels aren't doing it, have you considered using more beards?
While your front-of-camera talent is totally doing his part (rockin' beard, Rob!), perhaps your behind-the-camera staff needs to step up, too. Come on...show some teamwork here, people.
"But..." you (Mr Sparkfun) might say "...my videographers are women". Well, that need not be a hurdle, because these sound-absorbing beards need not be real beards. Fake beards are are well-known to have very similar acoustic absorption properties as real beards*.
[*this claim has not at all been scientifically confirmed. Readers, seize this opportunity...the modeling and measurement of the acoustic properties of beards would be a perfect PhD thesis]
So, for next week's video, I implore you, please, go strap on a bushy fake beard and do your part for Sparkfun acoustics! Love. Sparkfun. Beards.