Adafruit’s Top Ten Best Selling Products of 2020 #AdafruitTopTen

WOOF! To shake off this long year, we’re gonna look back and celebrate 2020’s most popular, tried-and-true electronics, micro and mega!

10. Adafruit HUZZAH32 – ESP32 Feather Board

Aww yeah, 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. We have other boards in the Feather family, check’em out here.

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.

Please note: The ESP32 is still targeted to developers. Not all of the peripherals are fully documented with example code, and there are some bugs still being found and fixed. We got all of our Featherwings working under Arduino IDE, so you can expect things like I2C and SPI and analog reads to work. But other elements are still under development. For that reason, we recommend this Feather for makers who have some experience with microcontroller programming, and not as a first dev board.

9. Header Kit for Feather – 12-pin and 16-pin Female Header Set

These two Female Headers alone are, well, lonely. But pair them with any of our Feather boards and you’re in business!

What do they do? They get soldered on either side of the Feather board. Now you can plug in FeatherWings to add more capability to your portable project. Unlike our Feather Stacking Headers, they aren’t designed to ‘stack’, but they’re more compact.

Note: Comes with one 12-pin and one 16-pin header, Feathers not included.

8. Slim Sticker-type GSM/Cellular Quad-Band Antenna – 3dBi uFL

That’s one slim cellular antenna! At just 75mm long from tip to tip and with a thickness of just 2mm, this 3dBi GSM antenna is slim, compact, and sensitive, with a 3dBi gain.  The antenna juts out from its base with a stick-on back so you attach it to an enclosure if you’re making something like, say, a DIY phone.  It has a tiny uFL connector on the end – which is perfect for the FONA – but will also work well for any other RF project on the 850/900/1800/1900/2100 bands, such as any other Cellular or GSM/GPRS device.

We also offer a version of this antenna with a longer 300mm cable.

7. JST-PH Battery Extension Cable – 500mm

By popular demand, we have a handy extension cord for all of our JST-terminated battery packs (such as our LiIon/LiPoly and 3xAAA holders). One end has a JST-PH socket, and the other end has a matching plug. Between the two, 500mm of color-coded wire. Handy for wearable projects where you may want the battery pack far from your Flora but useful in many other situations where you need a little more space.

6. Panel Mount USB Cable – A Male to A Female

This handy USB extension cable will make it easy for you to enclose a device that has an A type (USB host) port. We think this would be most handy when putting a Raspberry Pi or Mintyboost into a box.

The jack half has two mounting ‘ears’ with 12mm M3 screws installed, 30mm apart. The ears are flexible so the holes don’t have to be drilled very precisely. Can be used with box walls up to 0.25″ wide. The screws can be put on from the back for ‘reverse’ mounting if the box thickness is a problem. Entire unit is 13.4″ long from tip to tip (with 10.2″ cabling between USB connectors).

5. Panel Mount Ethernet Extension Cable

This handy Ethernet extension cable will make it easy for you to enclose a device that has an Ethernet port. We think this would be most useful when putting a Beagle Bone, Raspberry Pi, Arduino Ethernet into a box.

The jack half has two mounting ‘ears’ with 4-40 screws installed, 1″ inch / 25mm apart. The ears are flexible so the holes don’t have to be drilled very precisely. Can be used with box walls up to 0.25″ wide. The screws can be put on from the back for ‘reverse’ mounting if the box thickness is a problem. The entire unit is approximately 13″ long (10″ cabling between jack and RJ45 Ethernet connector).

4. Photo cell (CdS photoresistor)

CdS cells are little light sensors. As the squiggly face is exposed to more light, the resistance goes down. When there’s light, the resistance is about ~1KΩ, when dark it goes up to ~10KΩ.

To use, connect one side of the photo cell (either one, it’s symmetric) to power (for example 5V) and the other side to your microcontroller’s analog input pin. Then connect a 10K pull-down resistor from that analog pin to ground. The voltage on the pin will be 2.5V or higher when it’s light out and near ground when it’s dark.

CdS photocells are not RoHS compliant, so if you need something equivalent but RoHS compliant, check out the phototransistor.

3. GPIO Stacking Header for Pi A+/B+/Pi 2/Pi 3 – Extra-long 2×20 Pins

Connect your own PCB to a Raspberry Pi B+ and stack on top with this normal-height female header with extra long pins.  The female header part is about 8.5mm tall, good for small HATs that do not clear the USB/Ethernet jacks. This header has extra long 10mm pins, compared with our plain version which is the same base height but has 3mm header pins instead. With 10mm you can have a HAT that has extra pins to stack another HAT on top!

2. JST PH 2-Pin Cable – Female Connector 100mm

Red and black tinned wires with a 2-pin JST PH connector on the end. 4″ / 100mm long. Matches up nicely with our Lipoly chargers!

1. 10-pin 2×5 Socket-Socket 1.27mm IDC (SWD) Cable – 150mm long

These little cables are handy when programming or debugging a tiny board that uses 10-pin 1.27mm (0.05″) pitch SWD programming connectors. We see these connectors often on ARM Cortex dev kits and have a few handy in our ARM-dev box. We thought you may want a backup cable as well, so now they are in the Adafruit shop!

One cable per order. The ribbon cable is 0.06mm/0.025″ pitch, and the connector is a 1.27mm (0.05″) pitch 2×5 box. These are not for use with programming most AVRs or other large devices that have 0.1″ pitch connectors so be aware which you need!