Adafruit’s Top Ten New Products of the Decade #AdafruitTopTen #DecadeofAdafruit
Welcome to the roaring ’20s!! Not only are we rolling over a new year, but we are also looking back at an entire decade! It’s great to see all the growth and soak up some nostalgia. During the last decade, Ladyada has designed more than 300 Adafruit products, many of which were suggested by you, our community members.
For the next couple of weeks we will be listing off some of the favorite posts, tweets, products and more from the 10s. Follow along and check back!
Cheers to another ten years!
10. MintyBoost Kit – v3.0
The world’s first and only open-source hardware charger: The MintyBoost®!
Please review the Minty Boost project page(s) before purchase and assembly!, some phones require different modifications to the kit to charge properly! Some phones such as the *iPhone 3GS are very sensitive to charging via USB and may not work in all environments or configurations.
Make your own iPod/iPhone/GPS/etc… battery-pack and recharger!
This project includes all the electronic parts necessary to build your own MintyBoost: a small & simple (but very powerful) USB charger for your iPod (or other mp3 player), camera, cell phone, and any other gadget you can plug into a USB port to charge.
The charger circuitry and 2 AA batteries fit into an small space such as an Altoids gum or mint tin, and will run your iPod for hours, 2.5x more than you’d get from a 9V USB charger! You can use rechargeable batteries too.
New In Version 3: Provides 500mA @ 5V, tested and designed to work with all the latest iGadgets including the latest iPhones and iPods, etc., improved efficiency for high-drain devices, works much better with LiPoly battery mods.
9. PowerBoost 1000 Charger – Rechargeable 5V Lipo USB Boost @ 1A – 1000C
PowerBoost 1000C is the perfect power supply for your portable project! With a built-in load-sharing battery charger circuit, you’ll be able to keep your power-hungry project running even while recharging the battery! This little DC/DC boost converter module can be powered by any 3.7V LiIon/LiPoly battery, and convert the battery output to 5.2V DC for running your 5V projects.
8. Adafruit Feather 32u4 Bluefruit LE
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 Adafruit Feather 32u4 Bluefruit – our take on an ‘all-in-one’ Arduino-compatible + Bluetooth Low Energy with built in USB and battery charging. Its an Adafruit Feather 32u4 with a BTLE module, ready to rock!
7. Adafruit HUZZAH32 – ESP32 Feather Board
Aww yeah, it’s the Feather you have been waiting for! The HUZZAH32 is our ESP32-based Feather, made with the official WROOM32 module. We packed everything you love about Feathers: built in USB-to-Serial converter, automatic bootloader reset, Lithium Ion/Polymer charger, and just about all of the GPIOs brought out so you can use it with any of our Feather Wings.
That module nestled in at the end of this Feather contains a dual-core ESP32 chip, 4 MB of SPI Flash, tuned antenna, and all the passives you need to take advantage of this powerful new processor. The ESP32 has both WiFi and Bluetooth Classic/LE support. That means it’s perfect for just about any wireless or Internet-connected project.
6. Ladyada’s Electronics Toolkit
Starting out on your electronics adventure?
Want to wield the mighty soldering iron?
Tired of saying “I’d totally get into electronics if I only knew what tools to get…”?
Working with substandard equipment is a terrible way to learn electronics: a lot of frustration with too little success. The right tool set will keep you progressing without the stressing.
This toolbox contains carefully selected hand tools that will last you for many many years.
5. Adafruit CRICKIT for Circuit Playground Express
Sometimes we wonder if robotics engineers ever watch movies. If they did, they’d know that making robots into slaves always ends up in a robot rebellion. Why even go down that path? Here at Adafruit, we believe in making robots our friends!
So if you find yourself wanting a companion, consider the robot. They’re fun to program, and you can get creative with decorations.
With that in mind, we designed Crickit – That’s our Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express that lets you #MakeRobotFriend using CircuitPython, MakeCode, or Arduino.
4. Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout – 66 channel w/10 Hz updates
We carry a few different GPS modules here in the Adafruit shop, but none that satisfied our every desire – that’s why we designed this little GPS breakout board. We believe this is the Ultimate GPS module, so we named it that. It’s got everything you want and more:
- -165 dBm sensitivity, 10 Hz updates, 66 channels
- 5V friendly design and only 20mA current draw
- Breadboard friendly + two mounting holes
- RTC battery-compatible
- Built-in datalogging
- PPS output on fix
- Internal patch antenna + u.FL connector for external active antenna
- Fix status LED
- New! Version 3 comes with the latest module which has external antenna support and Pulse-Per-Second output
…all for under $40!
3. 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!
2. Adafruit METRO 328 – Arduino Compatible – with Headers – ATmega328
This is the Adafruit METRO Arduino-Compatible – with headers. It’s a fully assembled and tested microcontroller and physical computing board with through-hole headers attached.
The METRO works great with the Arduino IDE, and runs the ATmega328P at 16MHz so it is shape and pin-compatible with Arduino UNO R3 shields and boards. You can use this with the Arduino IDE (both desktop and cloud version) by selecting ‘Arduino UNO’ in the Boards menu.
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.