The SparkFun Qwiic HAT for Raspberry Pi is the quickest and easiest way to enter SparkFun’s Qwiic / STEMMA QT ecosystem when using that Raspberry Pi that you’ve come to know and love. The Qwiic HAT connects the I2C bus (GND, 3.3V, SDA, and SCL) on your Raspberry Pi to an array of Qwiic connectors on the HAT. Since the Qwiic system allows for daisy-chaining boards with different addresses, you can stack as many sensors as you’d like to create a monolith of sensing power!
For fans of the TMP36, we now have a very similar analog temperature sensor with a 3-pin JST connector (we call these STEMMA connectors). Unlike many of our temperature sensors, this one is analog output, not I2C, so its best used by a microcontroller with an analog input, as most microcontrollers do.
These sensors are very simple to use, no libraries or complex configurations required. Plug this board into any of our 3-pin JST PH cables (we have ones with header ends, alligator clips, etc) Red goes to 3V to 5V DC power, black wire connects to ground, and white wire connects to an analog input. The voltage out is 0V at -50°C and 1.75V at 125°C. You can easily calculate the temperature from the voltage in millivolts: Temp °C = 100*(reading in V) – 50
Measuring voltage and adjusting it is what electronics is all about so you won’t get far without friends like the Adafruit PCF8591 Quad 8-bit ADC + 8-bit DAC combo. Analog to Digital Converters help by measuring an analog voltage and turning it into something a microcontroller like a Metro or Arduino can understand. If you’re using a single board computer like a Raspberry Pi, you might not have any other way to measure a voltage because even though they are well equipped for digital circuits, many boards of that type don’t have any pins that can measure analog voltages. Learn more!
Adafruit has had paid day off for voting for our team for years, if you need help getting that going for your organization, let us know – we can share how and why we did this as well as the good results. Here are some resources for voting by mail, voting in person, and some NY resources for our NY based teams as well. If there are additional resources to add, please let us know – adafruit.com/vote
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
