Adafruit’s Top Ten Best Selling Products of 2019 #AdafruitTopTen
Happy 2020! To celebrate another year in the books, here are our top 10 best selling Adafruit products from 2019!
10. Adafruit Metro Mini 328 – Arduino-Compatible – 5V 16MHz
Make your Arduino-based project tiny and with the Adafruit METRO Mini! The METRO Mini works great with the Arduino IDE, and runs the ATmega328P at 16MHz so it is pin-compatible with Arduino UNO R3 – note you won’t be able to plug in shields, but great for use with breadboards.
We sure love the ATmega328 here at Adafruit, and we use them a lot for our own projects. The processor has plenty of GPIO, Analog inputs, hardware UART SPI and I2C, timers and PWM galore – just enough for most simple projects.
9. NeoPixel Stick – 8 x 5050 RGB LED with Integrated Drivers
Make your own little LED strip arrangement with this stick of NeoPixel LEDs. We crammed 8 of the tiny 5050 (5mm x 5mm) smart RGB LEDs onto a PCB with mounting holes and a chainable design. Use only one microcontroller pin to control as many as you can chain together! Each LED is addressable as the driver chip is inside the LED. Each one has ~18mA constant current drive so the color will be very consistent even if the voltage varies, and no external choke resistors are required making the design slim. Power the whole thing with 5VDC (4-7V works) and you’re ready to rock.
8. Adafruit TSL2591 High Dynamic Range Digital Light Sensor
When the future is dazzlingly-bright, this ultra-high-range luminosity sensor will help you measure it. The TSL2591 luminosity sensor is an advanced digital light sensor, ideal for use in a wide range of light situations. Compared to low cost CdS cells, this sensor is more precise, allowing for exact lux calculations and can be configured for different gain/timing ranges to detect light ranges from 188 uLux up to 88,000 Lux on the fly.
7. DC Gearbox Motor – “TT Motor” – 200RPM – 3 to 6VDC
Perhaps you’ve been assembling a new robot friend, adding a computer for a brain and other fun personality touches. Now the time has come to let it leave the nest and fly on its own wings– err, wheels!
These durable (but affordable!) plastic gearbox motors (also known as ‘TT’ motors) are an easy, low-cost way to get your projects moving. This is a TT DC Gearbox Motor with a gear ratio of 1:48, and it comes with 2 x 200mm wires with breadboard-friendly 0.1″ male connectors. Perfect for plugging into a breadboard or terminal blocks.
6. Adafruit Trinket M0 – For Use with CircuitPython & Arduino IDE
The Adafruit Trinket M0 may be small, but do not be fooled by its size! It’s a tiny microcontroller board, built around the Atmel ATSAMD21, a little chip with a lot of power. We wanted to design a microcontroller board that was small enough to fit into any project, and low cost enough to use without hesitation. Perfect for when you don’t want to give up your expensive dev-board and you aren’t willing to take apart the project you worked so hard to design. It’s our lowest-cost CircuitPython programmable board!
5. Stacking Headers for Feather – 12-pin and 16-pin female headers
These two Female Stacking Headers alone are, well, lonely. But pair them with any of our Feather boards and you’re in business!
What do they do? They stack. Put the headers through your Feather and then you can not only plug them into a solderless breadboard, but you could attach circuitry on top as well.
4. Raspberry Pi – Model B+ – 1.4GHz Cortex-A53 with 1GB RAM
The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is the most popular Raspberry Pi computer made, and the Pi Foundation knows you can always make a good thing better! And what could make the Pi 3 better? How about a faster processor, 5 GHz WiFi, and updated Ethernet chip with PoE capability? Good guess – that’s exactly what they did!
The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ boasts an updated 64-bit quad core processor running at 1.4GHz with built-in metal heatsink, dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless LAN, faster (300 mbps) Ethernet, and PoE capability via a separate PoE HAT.
3. Raspberry Pi Zero W
If you didn’t think that the Raspberry Pi Zero could possibly get any better, then boy do we have a pleasant surprise for you! The new Raspberry Pi Zero W offers all the benefits of the Pi Zero v1.3, but with one big difference – built-in WiFi!
More specifically, this giant upgrade is the addition of a BCM43143 WiFi chip BUILT-IN to your Raspberry Pi Zero – just like the Pi 3! No more pesky WiFi adapters – this Pi is WiFi ready. There’s also Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) on board making the Pi an excellent IoT solution (BLE support is still in the works, software-wise).
2. Raspberry Pi 4 Model B – 4G RAM
The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is the newest Raspberry Pi computer made, and the Pi Foundation knows you can always make a good thing better! And what could make the Pi 4 better than the 3? How about a faster processor, USB 3.0 ports, and updated Gigabit Ethernet chip with PoE capability? Good guess – that’s exactly what they did!
The Raspberry Pi 4 is the latest product in the Raspberry Pi range, boasting an updated 64-bit quad core processor running at 1.5GHz with built-in metal heatsink, USB 3 ports, dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless LAN, faster Gigabit Ethernet, and PoE capability via a separate PoE HAT.
1. Circuit Playground Express
Circuit Playground Express is the next step towards a perfect introduction to electronics and programming. We’ve taken the original Circuit Playground Classic and made it even better! Not only did we pack even more sensors in, we also made it even easier to program.
Start your journey with Microsoft MakeCode block-based or Javascript programming. Then, you can use the same board to try CircuitPython, with the Python interpreter running right on the Express. As you progress, you can advance to using Arduino IDE, which has full support of all the hardware down to the low level, so you can make powerful projects. You can even use code.org CS Discoveries to learn all about coding right in your browser!
Because you can program the same board in 3 different ways – the Express has great value and re-usability. From beginners to experts, Circuit Playground Express has something for everyone.
