It’s not out yet…so don’t ask! It was so cold out, we stayed in and worked on the Metro M7 featuring the iMX RT1011 (the lil sister chip to the RT1062 that stars in the Teensy 4). This chip is really fast, clocking at 500 MHz, and has 128K of RAM. For FLASH, it uses an external QSPI chip which we’ll share for filesystem use as well. On the left we put an ESP32 footprint, we use the ESP32 as a WiFi co-processor. You can power it over USB C or a 9V DC power jack, we’ll probably change out the 3V LDO regulator for a buck, since the current requirements are going to be high on this board. This is only 2 layers, but we think it might be OK.
Saturday, February 29, 2020
New Products this week Featuring #Adafruit #NeoPXL8 #FeatherWing for #FeatherM4 – 8 x DMA #NeoPixels
Browse through all that’s new here!
NEW PRODUCTS THIS WEEK
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Adafruit NeoPXL8 FeatherWing for Feather M4 – 8 x DMA NeoPixels!
Since we first started carrying NeoPixels back in 2012, the chainable RGB LEDs have taken over the world. And a big part of that success is due to the simplicity of their wiring – just one data wire, no matter how many pixels you’ve got. So no surprise they’re everywhere, blinking away in art exhibits, maker faire demos, DJ booths, decorations, and costumes.
But, at some point, every NeoPixel’er bumps into the constraints of that single-data-wire: the timing is very picky and often time your code has to stop completely so that it can burst out the data without any interruptions. This requirement makes it tough to create fast-update lighting effects, and limits the number of pixels you can drive before other hardware peripherals get attention.
See more!
5-pin (Arduino MKR) to 4-pin JST SH STEMMA QT / Qwiic Cable – 100mm long
Are you a maker in the midst of a STEMMA dilemma? This 100mm long cable is a fantastic chimera-cable fitted with STEMMA QT 4-pin JST SH on one end, and Arduino MKR 5-pin JST SH connectors on the other, with the wires spun around so you can use it to connect STEMMA QT sensors we’ve got to any of the popular Arduino MKR boards!
JST SH (also known as Qwiic) connectors have 1mm pitch. This cable can be used with STEMMA QT boards to easily connect sensors and drivers from one board to the other.
See more!
Garmin LIDAR-Lite Optical Distance LED Sensor – V4
Garmin’s LIDAR-Lite LED V4 is the latest, ideal high-performance (but compact) optical distant measurement sensor solution for robotics, Internet of Things, and unmanned vehicles – or any application where an ultrasonic sensor might otherwise be used. Garmin makes high-quality sensors. They’re renowned for their GPS sensors, and these distance sensors are nice and high-quality devices.
You can measure up to 10 meters away with an LED optics sensor that draws only 85 mA during an acquisition. You can easily adjust between accuracy, operating range and measurement time using the I2C command set.
See more!
Tubing for Submersible Pumps – PVC 8mm ID – 1 Meter Long
Coming soon! Sign up to be notified when in stock
This tubing is designed to go with our simple submersible pumps. Great for making water-powered projects. This tubing seems to be made of PVC, it’s definitely not food safe, we recommend it for use with plant-watering or fountain projects only. It’s super easy to cut and you get a full meter!
Submersible 3V DC Water Pump – Horizontal Type
Coming soon! Sign up to be notified when in stock
Make fountains or plant-watering projects with this submersible water pump. It’s great for beginner projects and super easy to use! The pump is basically a DC motor that is powered with 3V and draws 100mA. When powered, the pump sucks water in from the side of the plastic casing and pushes it out the tubing port. The pump must be primed by keeping it inside water at all times. Reversing the polarity does not turn it into a suction device, it will only pump water!
See more!
Submersible 3V DC Water Pump – Vertical Type
This isn’t for use with drinking water! We don’t have longevity rating for this pump, we’ve run it for a week and it seems OK but we would not recommend it for long term installations. It’s best used by students and artists who want something simple and inexpensive.
You can PWM the motor to speed up or slow down the flow rate. Works great with either a power transistor (basic on/off) or a motor driver chip such as the L293D. If you need a self-priming / food-safe / reversible direction pump, check out our peristaltic pumps!
New Products 2/26/2020 Featuring #Adafruit #NeoPXL8 #FeatherWing for #FeatherM4 – 8 x DMA #NeoPixels
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Adafruit’s community Discord server is now in server Discovery! JOIN 16,000+ makers! @adafruit @discordapp #discord
YAY! Discord’s server Discovery has a bunch of requirements and our community got there together! The Adafruit’s community Discord server is now in server Discovery!
Let’s put adafruit on the map!
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Thanks for abiding by our community Guidelines and keeping your server safe!250+ Members
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Your community metrics look great! Your members are active and continuously come back to participate.No Bad Words
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You can find it by click the magnifying glass and searching for: Adafruit, DIY, electronics, Python, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and more!
Join all 16,000+ makers on the Adafruit Community server! https://discord.gg/adafruit
An Idiosyncratic Selection of California Art Presses
via Hyperallergic
The art book presses populating these fairs offer the possibility for almost anyone to own creative, crafted objects that are also sometimes handmade and limited, art objects in their own right. On the West Coast, California has a rich history of artful book making. Here’s a small sampling of presses old and new. All are producing fascinating work, though some are more affordable than others, with prices ranging from $30 to sometimes over $3,000 for the extra-special handbound, handset titles.
Happy Leap Day…Why tho? #LeapDay #LeapYear #Explained #Calendar #Space
Happy Leap Day! every 4 years February adds an extra day to muck up the calendar and make confusing birthdays (looking at you Raspberry Pi)
Most people know the general idea: the earth doesn’t rotate around the sun exactly in 365 days. But for a lot of us the specifics get a little murky.
Check out the SciShow on YouTube for a full explanation and a surprising amount of caveats:
From NASA:
The length of a year is based on how long it takes a planet to revolve around the Sun. Earth takes about 365.2422 days to make one revolution around the Sun. That’s about six hours longer than the 365 days that we typically include in a calendar year. As a result, every four years we have about 24 extra hours that we add to the calendar at the end of February in the form of leap day. Without leap day, the dates of annual events, such as equinoxes and solstices, would slowly shift to later in the year, changing the dates of each season. After only a century without leap day, summer wouldn’t start until mid-July!
View and Convert Negatives with #RaspberryPi and #3DPrinting #celebratephotography
From Random_Canadian on Instructables:
I recognize that there are various apps for my smart phone but I was unable to get satisfactory results so this is what I came up with…
I wanted to be able to view them in real time as actual pictures. I can manually sort through the negatives and record only the ones that I want.
We #celebratephotography here at Adafruit every Saturday. From photographers of all levels to projects you have made or those that inspire you to make, we’re on it! Got a tip? Well, send it in!
If you’re interested in making your own project and need some gear, we’ve got you covered. Be sure to check out our Raspberry Pi accessories and our DIY cameras.
View and Convert Negatives with #RaspberryPi and #3DPrinting #celebratephotography
From Random_Canadian on Instructables:
I recognize that there are various apps for my smart phone but I was unable to get satisfactory results so this is what I came up with…
I wanted to be able to view them in real time as actual pictures. I can manually sort through the negatives and record only the ones that I want.
We #celebratephotography here at Adafruit every Saturday. From photographers of all levels to projects you have made or those that inspire you to make, we’re on it! Got a tip? Well, send it in!
If you’re interested in making your own project and need some gear, we’ve got you covered. Be sure to check out our Raspberry Pi accessories and our DIY cameras.
Friday, February 28, 2020
Now is a good time to try out tools like StreamYard to bring people together online via collaborative video and streaming @streamyardapp
Adafruit has been doing a form of live video “show and tell” for about 10 years or so, every single week. We started with Google Hangouts, and after that was sunsetted by Google, we moved to StreamYard and it’s fantastic. The video above is from our show and tell from last week. We have some of our team show what they’re up to and anyone around the world can join in and show and share their latest project. We’ve hired about a dozen people from meeting them via our show and tell, we’ve seen kids grow up before our eyes over a decade, we’ll made friends, a community together, we’ve had folks stream from hospital beds to makerspaces to girl scout troops.
Here’s the playlist on YouTube, there are about 400 videos … and check out StreamYard, we have nothing to do with them other than using their service. We stream the show and tell, each week to: YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, Mixer, LinkeIn, and Periscope. The text chat is in our Discord with about 16,000 members: https://discord.gg/adafruit
If you have a company or community (or both!), try it out, and if you make “something”, anything, (everyone does!), stop by and join us any Weds at 7:30pm ET.
The Wireless Feather Bluefruit Sense test flight with Web Bluetooth!
The Wireless Feather Bluefruit Sense test flight with Web Bluetooth! (video). Our new Feather Bluefruit Sense is available in the adafruit shop – its jam-packed with temperature, humidity, pressure, sound, light/color/proximity, and motion/orientation sensors. Even has a lil button! How to test it out? Melissa coded up a dashboard in javascript, using a Chrome browser you can visit the webpage, pair with the Feather and display all this data wirelessly! The dashboard is comin’ soon, and you can grab a feather now at https://www.adafruit.com/bluefruitsense
Alexa Voice Controlled Raspberry Pi Drone With IoT and AWS #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi
via instructables
Hi! My name is Armaan. I’m a 13-year-boy from Massachusetts. This tutorial shows, as you can infer from the title, how to build a Raspberry Pi Drone. This prototype demonstrates how drones are evolving and also how big a part they might play in the future. I can definitely see myself waking up in 10 years and asking a drone to get breakfast for me. The drone uses Amazon Alexa, Amazon Web Services, IoT(Internet of Things), and most importantly a Raspberry Pi to run. It is meant to demonstrate and inform about drones and how they are improving every day. Hopefully you are successful and learn about drones in the process. Good luck and thanks for reading. -Armaan
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
Boot a Raspberry Pi4 with an SSD to make it reliable and fast #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi
Shared by Andreas Spiess on YouTube:
Enough is enough! I waited for more than half a year to boot my new Raspberry Pi 4 from SSD to increase its speed and reduce the chance of losing my valuable data. Today we will change that. Without the help of the Raspberry project team. All we need is know-how, a little bit of time, and an old SD card.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
🥧🥧Happy Birthday Raspberry Pi Adafruit Learn Guide Roundup 2020🥧🥧 #RaspberryPi @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay
Happy Birthday!! Terrible Twos or the Great Eights, no matter how you count the last year, we added some stellar guides for the Pi.
To celebrate we are rounding up some of our latest greatest Raspberry pi learn guides in the Adafruit Learn system! We added over a dozen new guides for the Raspberry Pi, view a selection of them below.
After viewing all the slick projects you could tackle in the Learning system, you may get a hankering to stock up on Pi gear. Check out the Raspberry Pi Gift Guide for a great place to get started with Rasperry Pi.
Raspberry Pi + Teachable Machine = Teachable Pi In our previous demos, we got Google’s Object Detection models running on a Raspberry Pi so that you could build your own smart camera! There’s just one thing–what if you want to recognize something else besides coffee cups and people? Until recently, this was challenging; either it required a complex Colaboratory notebook or a long series of local commands to set up a local TensorFlow environment. (Learn more!)
Using the Slamtec RPLIDAR on a Raspberry Pi – LIDAR is all the range*. It’s one of the fundamental sensing technologies of autonomous vehicles. It gives a system the ability to see how far away things are 360 degrees around it.
We used the Garmin LIDAR range finder in another guide. It works by sending out a pulse of modulated laser light which bounces off whatever it’s aimed at and is read by an optical receiver. The time that takes is a measure of distance to the surface it bounced off of. While being very cool and very effective technology, it just looks in one direction. You could mount it on a stepper motor and repeatedly rotate and take a reading. Or you could use a 360 degree LIDAR system like the RPLIDAR from Slamtec. (Learn more)
Mini Smart Home with Huzzah, HASSio and Crickit – Though the term Internet of Things covers a vast range of tech, most people think of Smart Homes. There are many ways doing a Smart Home, but I think that the word “smart” is used a bit too loosely. If you have ever looked at consumer Smart Home products, most of them require an app on your phone and probably another app that connects those apps. Even then most of the logic that goes into Automations is limited to something like: “if this one thing happens, then do this other one thing”. Then there is the constant request for remote internet access that ties up network resources, creates a security risk, and gives control over your personal data to large companies. (Learn more)
How to Convert a JVC Videosphere into a Monitor for Raspberry Pi and Desktop Computers – Bring back a legendary vintage television from the space age!
This guide walks through how convert a classic RF CRT TV into a monitor for Raspberry Pi or any desktop computer.
With a couple cables and a signal boosting box, you can output the signal from just about any computer to the JVC Videosphere. (Learn more)
PiTFT Python + Pillow Animated Gif Player – Have you wanted to play animated Gifs on the Raspberry Pi without showing or taking over the entire desktop? Or maybe you are only wanting to SSH into the Pi and play some kind of animation without the fancy graphical environment. Or possibly, you just want to know how to play animated Gifs with Python and the Pillow library. If so, this is the guide for you. (Learn more)
Measuring your pulse with graphics and sound with CLUE #Adafruit #CLUE @Adafruit
Adafruit forums poster manor shares a wonderful pulse sensor visualized with the new Adafruit CLUE board.
This project used a Pulse Sensor and the Adafruit ARCADA library for the Arduino IDE.
There is a video posted of the project in action (Google Drive).
You too may post your project on the Adafruit Forums!
Time Lapse Camera Rig #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi
via KevB1 on instructables
My time-lapse rig uses a first gen’ Pi + a very cheap USB webcam + a free stand (bipod). Part of my build criteria is to reuse/up-cycle stuff I’ve already got, otherwise I’d have just gone out and bought a Pi camera module and used this project guide. Oh.. and it all had to be run via the terminal – as I envisaged that most/all of the post processing would be done remotely (headless), or not using a network.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
Clone Trooper PiTop #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi
via moryarti on instructables
I started off with the Star Wars Clone Trooper Learning Laptop from Oregon Scientific.
There are a few different versions of this laptop but I picked this one because of the color scheme, a real keyboard instead of just a membrane one, and the larger wide screen display. It also needed be big enough to fit all of the parts inside.
I disassembled the laptop. I had to be careful with the top because the screws holding it together are beneath the edge of the plastic graphic sheet and part of the picture stuck to the case and part came off with the plastic sheet. I didn’t pull the sheet completely off, just enough to expose the screws and as long as it was still attached around the middle the graphic lined back up when it was reassembled. With the case top and bottom off I could see that the keyboard, speaker, PCB, and screen are all attached to the two piece folding middle section of the computer. I kept with that idea of attaching all of my components to the middle section and just screwing the top and bottom covers back on when completed.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
Film Negative Viewer and Converter @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi
Sooner or later there won’t be any negatives left to develop anymore. But right now we still live in a time when one might come across a bunch of negatives or film that needs to be developed. When that happens, most of us don’t have the tools to see what’s on those negatives, and the expensive process of printing comes into play. [Random_Canadian] has created a 3D printed negative viewer and converter that looks fantastic.
More from hackaday:
The Pi uses the negative image effect to turn the negatives positive, and then outputs them to the TV. If [Random_Canadian] finds one worth bringing into the 21st century, he pushes the green button to take a picture with the Pi camera and save it to that awesome cryptex USB drive. When he’s tired of walking down memory lane, he pushes the red button to exit the program.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
Raspberry Pi Birthday Weekend Blog Roundup #RaspberryPi @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay
Happy 8th Birthday Raspberry Pi! Over the years we’ve seen heaps of great projects built with Raspberry Pi. Scroll below for some of our favorite Raspberry Pi content featured on the Adafruit blog over the past year.
1. Build a Car Computer with Raspberry Pi
2. How to Build an Android TV Box With a Raspberry Pi
3. On-Board Car Diagnostics with OBD II Pi Using Raspberry Pi
4. First Look at the BrainCraft HAT for Raspberry Pi and single board Linux computers
5. 16 Cool Projects for Your New Raspberry Pi 4
6. Raspberry Pi OwnCloud: Your Own Personal Cloud Storage
7. Free PDF of The Official Beginner’s Guide Updated for Raspberry Pi 4
8. Build your own Raspberry Pi RFID Attendance System
9. Hacking the official Raspberry Pi keyboard: Build a battery-powered all-in-one Pi keyboard!
10. DIY Smart Glasses Built with a Raspberry Pi Zero W
11. Learn How to Setup Dietpi for the Raspberry Pi
12. The Downsides to Raspberry Pi Alternatives
13. Fan SHIM: When Your Raspberry Pi 4 Runs Hot
14. Green Box is a Fully Automated Hydroponics System for the Home
15. PiNAS – the Raspberry Pi NAS
16. Your Own Satellite Ground Station: SatNOGS With a Raspberry Pi 3B+