Adafruit’s Top Ten Best Selling Products of 2022 #AdafruitTopTen

Another year in the can! Check out our best selling, most beloved products that maker folks can’t get enough of.

10. Adafruit KB2040 – RP2040 Kee Boar Driver

A wild Kee Boar appears! It’s a shiny KB2040! An Arduino Pro Micro-shaped board for Keebs with RP2040. (#keeblife 4 evah) A lot of folks like using Adafruit parts for their Keeb builds – but with the ItsyBitsy not being pin-compatible with the Pro Micro pinout, it really wasn’t very easy without some sort of adapter plate.

Now we’re seeing lots of people use CircuitPython for keebs, which is awesome! So why not try our hands at spinning up a pro-micro-compatible RP2040 board? The RP2040 is plenty powerful, low-cost, and makes for an excellent keeb driver chip.

9. Adafruit MOSFET Driver – For Motors, Solenoids, LEDs, etc

Sparky the Blue Smoke Monster shows up whenever the magic smoke is let out of an electronic component. And his very favorite is whenever folks first start with electronics and robotics: wiring up a motor or solenoid or high power LED is a perfect recipe for getting that blue smoke out of an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. Why? Because these high-current devices can’t be connected directly to a GPIO pin on a microcontroller! They need to have a transistor / MOSFET driver, plus a kickback-protection diode that will absorb the inductive ‘kick’ caused by turning on-and-off motors and solenoids. Without that driver and diode – your tronix will go poof!

8. STEMMA QT / Qwiic JST SH 4-pin Cable – 100mm Long

This 4-wire cable is a little over 100mm / 4″ long and fitted with JST-SH female 4-pin connectors on both ends. Compared with the chunkier JST-PH these are 1mm pitch instead of 2mm, but still have a nice latching feel, while being easy to insert and remove.

This cable can be used with Qwiic boards, to easily connect sensors and drivers from one board to the other. The cables are made symmetrically so don’t worry about which side goes where! When used with Qwiic the colors are:

• Red – 3.3VDC Power
• Black – Ground
• Blue – I2C SDA Data
• Yellow – I2C SCL Clock

7. Adafruit Perma-Proto Half-sized Breadboard PCB – Single

Customers asked us to carry basic perf-board, but we never liked the look of most basic perf: it’s always crummy quality, with pads that flake off and no labeling. Then we thought about how people actually prototype – usually starting with a solderless breadboard and then transferring the parts to a more permanent PCB. That’s when we realized what people would really like is a proto board that makes it easy!

6. DE-9 (DB-9) Female Socket Connector to Terminal Block Breakout

Make your own custom DE-9 cable or DE-9 interface with ease, using this DE-9 Socket to Terminal Block Breakout. You get a nice solid PCB with an DE-9 socket and two strips of terminal blocks that you can use with stranded or solid core wire to quickly assemble your own wiring jigs.

Perfect for when you need a non-standard wiring setup or interfacing to an older device with one of these connectors

5. Adafruit EMC2101 I2C PC Fan Controller and Temperature Sensor

Cooling fans…They’re everywhere, and they serve the important purpose of keeping things cool, generally electronics. One might rightfully think: “these fans are pretty good at moving air to keep things cool; maybe I can use one of these neat computer fans to keep my widget frosty” followed closely by throwing up one’s hands in confusion at the sight of a 3 or even 4-pin connector. OK, power takes two pins but what are these other pins for and how do I use them to convince this fan to keep my things chilly?

The EMC2101 from Microchip/SMSC is a fan controller with temperature monitoring, and it will take care of all of that for you. Programmable PWM output and tachometer input, with both internal and external temperature sensing, with a 1°C accuracy, it’s a perfect friend for any 3 or 4-pin PC fan you may find.

4. GPIO Stacking Header for Pi A+/B+/Pi 2/Pi 3

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 to 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!

3. ULN2803: 8 Channel Darlington Driver (Solenoid/Unipolar Stepper)

Bring in some muscle to your output pins with 8 mighty Darlingtons! This DIP chip contains 8 drivers that can sink 500mA from a 50V supply and has kickback diodes included inside for driving coils. This will let your little microcontroller or microcomputer power solenoids, DC motors (in one direction), and unipolar stepper motors.

2. 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

1. 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!