What better way to treat your grad to a job well done than a gift of that Arduino item they’ve been needing for their summer projects? We’ve put together this list based on some of our favorite and most popular items that are sure to please. Enjoy!
Arduino is the popular open-source electronics prototyping platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments and is designed to be as flexible as possible to fit your project’s needs.
Products
Adafruit ARDX – v1.3 Experimentation Kit for Arduino (Uno R3) – v1.3: Interested in making neat stuff with an Arduino but not sure where to start? This kit includes all the pieces needed to complete 11 different circuits, along with a experimenter’s guide booklet & breadboard layout sheets. Basically everything you need to be playing within minutes of its arrival. No soldering required! (read more and check out our Starter Pack for Arduino (Includes Arduino Uno R3), Budget Pack for Arduino (Arduino Uno R3) – Uno w/328 and Arduino Starter Kit from Arduino.cc)
Getting Started with Arduino By Massimo Banzi – 3rd Edition: This valuable little book offers a thorough introduction to the open-source electronics prototyping platform that’s taking the design and hobbyist world by storm. Getting Started with Arduino, updated for the latest Arduino release, gives you lots of ideas for Arduino projects and helps you get going on them right away. From getting organized to putting the final touches on your prototype, all the information you need is right in the book. (read more or browse through our full selection of Arduino books here)
Smoke Translucent Enclosure for Arduino – Electronics enclosure – 1.0: We are very excited to have one of the first (and we think the best) Enclosure for Arduino & project box now available in gray translucent plastic, the future! (read more and see more colors)
Adafruit PowerBoost 500 Shield – Rechargeable 5V Power Shield: What’s a project if it’s trapped on your desk? Now you can take your Arduino anywhere you wish with the PowerBoost shield! This stackable shield goes onto your Arduino and provides a slim rechargeable power pack, with a built in battery charger as well as DC/DC booster.
Compatible with Arduino Uno, Duemilanove, Mega, Leonardo and Due – basically any Arduino-pinout-shaped Arduino as only the GND and 5V pins are used. (read more)
2.8″ TFT Touch Shield for Arduino w/Capacitive Touch: Add some sizzle to your Arduino project with a beautiful large touchscreen display shield with built in microSD card connection and a capacitive touchscreen. This TFT display is big (2.8″ diagonal) bright (4 white-LED backlight) and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 240×320 pixels with individual pixel control. It has way more resolution than a black and white 128×64 display. As a bonus, this display has a capacitive touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen. (read more and browse through our full range of TFTs and displays)
DIY Gamer Kit from Technology Will Save Us: Build your very own Arduino-based portable gaming toy with this kit from Tech Will Save Us!
The DIY Gamer Kit is an Arduino controlled gaming device. Once you solder the whole thing together, you’ll have an 8×8 LED matrix display that serves as the device’s screen. From there, just easily upload your game’s code onto an Arduino (not included) and play! It’s a great learning experience with a fun result. (read more and take a look at the Gameduino 2)
Adafruit Pro Trinket – 3V 12MHz: Trinket’s got a big sister in town – the Pro Trinket 3V! Pro Trinket combines everything you love about Trinket with the familiarity of the core Arduino chip, the ATmega328. It’s like an Arduino Pro Mini with more pins and USB tossed in.
Trinket’s a year old now, and while its been great to see tons of tiny projects, sometimes you just need more pins, more FLASH, and more RAM. That’s why we designed Pro Trinket, with 18 GPIO, 2 extra analog inputs, 28K of flash, and 2K of RAM. (read more and browse our full range of Trinkets)
Adafruit Feather 32u4 Basic Proto: Feather is the new development board from Adafruit, and like its namesake it is thin, light, and lets you fly! We designed Feather to be a new standard for portable microcontroller cores.
This is the Feather 32u4 Basic Proto, it has a bunch of prototyping space built right in. We have other boards in the Feather family, check’em out here! (read more)
Projects
Pro Trinket Power Meter: This is a useful project to build a small power meter using a Pro Trinket, an OLED display, and the INA219 current sensing breakout. You can use this power meter to measure the voltage, current, power, and milliamp-hours of current that are used by a device. Why are these measurements useful? If you’re estimating how long a device might run on batteries or if it’s possible to run off small solar cells then you’ll have to know how much power the device uses. This power meter project is perfect for connecting to a project or device to measure its power consumption and estimate how long it will run on batteries! (read more)
Pro Trinket Rotary Encoder: The Pro Trinket’s USB connector is used for uploading sketches, but the connector is not a full USB port due to lack of dedicated hardware. You can, though, use the connection to emulate some basic USB 1.1 devices via an Arduino software library presented in this tutorial. For example, via the USB 1.1 protocol, you can build low speed USB Human Interface Devices (or HID). Examples of HIDs are keyboards, mice, joysticks, gamepads, etc. (read more)
Wireless Game Show Poppers for the Classroom!: We have a $15.00 game show system for you based on a combination of wireless IR poppers and game show software for PC and Mac computers. All you need are 1) the Duo Pop for iPad Game , 2) a 5 volt Pro Trinket Arduino-compatible microcontroller, 3) Game Show Presenter Software (free demo version available) to create your questions as well as host your game, and 4) a little bit of time to hack and solder on the Duo Pop for iPad Receiver. Once finished with this project, you will have a popper USB receiver system that is completely hackable allowing you to interface the poppers with all kinds of other learning software for both PC and Mac computers. Are you ready to hack the Duo Pop? Before hacking, let’s discuss the parts that you will need for this project. (read more)
Adafruit NeoPixel FeatherWing: A Feather board without ambition is a Feather board without FeatherWings! This is the NeoPixel FeatherWing, a 4×8 RGB LED Add-on For All Feather Boards! Using our Feather Stacking Headers or Feather Female Headers you can connect a FeatherWing on top or bottom of your Feather board and make your Feather board strut like a peacock at a rave. (read more)
Mini Relay FeatherWings: A Feather board without ambition is a Feather board without FeatherWings! These are the Mini Relay FeatherWing. They will give you power to control, and control over power. Put simply, you can now turn on and off lamps, fans, solenoids, and other small appliances that run on up to 250VAC or DC power using any Feather board. (read more)
