NoCo Mini Maker Faire Reminder
Next Saturday, October 5th, is the Northern Colorado (NoCo) Mini Maker Faire in Loveland, CO. If you have never been to a Maker Faire, it’s a great opportunity to see tons of cool projects, meet a bunch of interesting people, and have an all-around great time. The faire takes place at the…
September Caption Contest
We’ve only got a week left in September (seriously!?) which means it’s time for a caption contest! The rules are the same as always, but here’s a refresher: Leave your funniest clean caption in the comments section below. We reserve the right to delete captions that we deem…
Donation Day - Support Flood Relief Efforts
As you more than likely know, Colorado was hit hard by some intense flooding about a week and a half ago. The final toll is still being calculated, but several lives were lost and many, many millions of dollars in damage occurred. Around 2,000 homes were either completely lost or severely damaged…
New Product Friday: Big Motor Clip Time
As you are more than likely aware, this past week, many areas of Colorado were absolutely devastated by flooding. In some areas, nearly 20 inches of rain fell in just a couple days. The damage is significant and it’s going to take years to fully recover. SparkFun wants to help. So on Monday,…
Enginursday: Keep Calm and Solder On!
If you know SparkFun, then you probably know that we are all about soldering. Whether it’s selling kits that teach you how to solder, teaching soldering classes, or hosting soldering competitions, we love anything and everything that involves soldering. We love it so much that we believe…
The Tethered Quad Tutorial
A few months back, Director of Education Lindsay Levkoff came up with the idea for SparkFun to create a “hacker-in-residence” program. We’d invite one (or two) of the amazingly smart and motivated people we’ve met over the years to spend a week or two at SparkFun building…
Midwest Tour and Win a Free RedBoard!
As you most likely know, SparkFun has been traveling around the U.S. doing all sorts of workshops. The most recent leg of the tour found our team doing everything from Scratch and Pico at a bunch of libraries to professional development at the Thomas Metcalf Laboratory at Illinois State University.…
TEDx Boulder 2013
Each year, Boulder hosts its own incarnation of the TED conferences called TEDx Boulder, featuring visionaries from across the state who come to share their insights on technology, entertainment and design based on a changing theme. Created in the spirit of TED’s mission - “ideas worth…
New Product Friday: Shield Your Eyes
Hello everyone! Even though we had some pretty intense flooding yesterday, we’ve got some new products to talk about. The VPN is flakey, the lights are flickering, but we’re doing our best to bring you new cool stuff. For anyone wanting to see what the OpenSegment shields look like lit…
Enginursday - On Self Taught Electronics
More and more these days, I am meeting people who have built complex, impressive, and clever electronic projects, and, when I ask, I’m surprised to find out that they have no formal engineering or technical education. Now, I’m not surprised because I don’t believe that electronics…
Back to "The Future!"
A few weeks ago I wrote about the concept of The Future and what has changed about it since the days when we dreamed of flying cars and food pills. I probably spend too much time thinking about it… so I wanted to know what everyone else thought. Turns out, I’m not the only one…
Engineering Roundtable - Burning Man Edition
On this edition of Engineering Roundtable, Chris Taylor shows us the steps he took to set up a solar power supply to run his LED weather balloon project at this year’s Burning Man festival. He covers the five major parts of any solar power system and explains how to choose a battery and solar…
Hello, Harto!
Let’s have a short, frank talk about the lunches we’re eating at work. Hot pockets? Are you serious? In January of this year, right when we were resolving to kick the bagel bites and give Lean Cuisine one last chance, we had the good luck to encounter the Hello Harto Indiegogo campaign.…
New Product Friday: A Generous Helping of New Products
This week we’ve got a little bit of everything. A new SparkFun tool, a couple of revisions, and a new board. Be sure to check out the video this week, it’s full of cringe. I challenge you to use a traditional third hand to eat tacos. I’m not saying this makes ours vastly superior,…
Enginursday - Three Childhood Mysteries Electrical Engineering Solved for Me
When I was a kid I was (in retrospect, unsurprisingly) a “why/how” kid. That’s not uncommon; what is uncommon is how long it lasted. I’ll let you know when I grow out of it. Throughout my childhood, there were a number of questions that I posed which, frankly, none of the…
Teaching Robotics in Africa
Teaching for SparkFun I get the opportunity to travel around the U.S. teaching technology to people from all walks of life and all levels of knowledge. I’m not always sure what the abilities of the audience will be and I rarely know how much time the participants will have after my workshops to…
According to Pete - PCB Layout Tips and Tricks
Over the years, we at SparkFun have laid out hundreds - nay, thousands - of PCB designs. Over time, we have come up with many tips and tricks that help make our lives a bit easier. Some of them you may already know, but some may be new - so today, we wanted to share them with you in this episode of…
New Product Friday: Blue Light Special
Welcome back everyone! As always, we’ve got some new products for your Friday enjoyment, including the long-awaited RN-52 breakout. I almost wish we had a more complex demo for the RN-52, but I wanted to show how it worked in a minimal configuration without much effort. Just a few buttons and…
Enginursday: For those of us on Macs
Before I get into this, I just want to announce our new twitter account for engineering; @SFE_Engineering. The account will be a way for us to show you guys what we’re up to, where we are going, and the occasion off topic twitter thread before we’re told to knock it off. So come for the…
We Have It In Stock
We love Mouser and Digikey. They carry everything. On the flip side, we like to think we are the ‘filter’ to Digikey; when you’re just getting started in electronics Digikey can be overwhelming! We know you probably just need the red 5mm LED. Where Digikey has over 445,000…
Recent Blog Comments
Pete-O / 3 hours ago 1
Aw, man. You’re killing me, even if it is true. I’ll most likely return to it at some point soon, but my attention is needed elsewhere for…
GordieGii / 12 hours ago 1
This looks great! I love the necklace here:…Member #336034 / 18 hours ago 1
What happened to According to Pete?
brennen / 24 hours ago 2
> I have to wonder why such a large company (I know you do multiples of revenue of other companies in the sector) didn’t have a support…
Member #500261 / 2 hours ago 1
Could you guys fix the Advanced SMD tutorial as well? You seemed to publish it before it was ready and it contains a “need link!!” In place…Re: New Tutorials To Get Your Learn On!