Adafruit’s Top Ten New Products of 2022 #AdafruitTopTen

We did it! Another year! Here are our top ten new products of the year

10. Socket Headers for Raspberry Pi Pico – 2 x 20 pin Female Headers

These Socket Headers alone are, well, lonely. But pair them with the Raspberry Pi Pico, and you’re in business!

Socket headers are like the duct tape of electronics. They’re great for connecting things, soldering to perf-boards, sockets for wires or break-away header, etc. These particular ones are designed to match up with boards that have two rows of 20 pins, so you can plug things in and out with ease.

Note: Kit includes two 20-pin header.  Pico not included.

9. Snap Action 2-to-6 Wiring Block Connector

Snap action blocks are perfect when you have to quickly wire up a bunch of free-hanging components, and you don’t want to solder. They’re much easier to use than wire nuts, and of course, they are reuseable and do not require any crimping!

This is a 2 to 6 wire block: there are two separate inputs and two sets of three outputs. They’re color-coded so easy to follow; the blue and red inputs match the colored outputs. Great for basic power or signal fan-outs.

8. Snap Action 3-to-3 Wiring Block Connector

Snap action blocks are perfect when you have to quickly wire up a bunch of free-hanging components, and you don’t want to solder. They’re much easier to use than wire nuts, and of course, they are reuseable and do not require any crimping!

This is a 3 to 3 wire block: there are three separate inputs and three separate outputs. They’re color coded so easy to follow, the red, yellow, and blue inputs match the colored outputs. Great for wire splicing, not for fan-outs (we have separate snap-action blocks that are good for that)

7. Adafruit ESP32 Feather V2 – 8MB Flash + 2 MB PSRAM

One of our star Feathers is the Adafruit HUZZAH32 ESP32 Feather – with the fabulous ESP32 WROOM module on there, it makes quick work of WiFi and Bluetooth projects that take advantage of Espressifs most popular chipset. Recently we had to redesign this feather to move from the obsolete CP2104 to the available CH9102F and one thing led to another and before you know it we made a completely refreshed design: the Adafruit ESP32 Feather V2.

6. Short Plug Headers for Raspberry Pi Pico – 2 x 20 Male Headers

These two Short Plug / Male Headers alone are, well, lonely. But pair them with the Raspberry Pi Pico, and you’re in business!

These 2.54mm / 0.1″ pitch headers are particularly cute and tiny and are designed to match perfectly with the Pico and our short socket headers. Note that you could use normal header with those sockets headers, but these are short and don’t need clipping. Great for when you want a super-slim easy-to-plug kit of Pico + hardware.

Note: Kit includes two 20-pin header.  Pico not included.

5. nOOds – Flexible LED Filament – 3V 300mm long – Warm White

Our favorite food when hacking on code or electronics is a hot bowl of noodles – and around NYC these are often called ‘noods’! What we’ve got here are flexible LED noodles, in different lengths and colors. All are not good for eatin’ but they are good for cool lighting effects

These are often seen in ‘Edison-like’ LED bulbs, shaped into hearts or stars or just wound around to create a fun or warm lighting effect. They’re made of dozens of micro LED diodes that are bonded together on an ultra flexible metal backing, then coated in colorful silicone for protection. Since the LEDs are in parallel, you only need 3V to light ’em up – we recommend current limiting with a resistor to let max 50mA through.

Comes one per pack. Add some mini, noodle-y neon bling to your miniature sets, dioramas, dollhouses, mini-verses, what have you! These look and feel like what we always wanted out of EL wire, and because they’re just a ‘big long LED’ you can PWM dim them easily.

4. nOOds – Flexible LED Filament – 3V 130mm long – Warm White

Our favorite food when hacking on code or electronics is a hot bowl of noodles – and around NYC these are often called ‘noods’! What we’ve got here are flexible LED noodles, in different lengths and colors. All are not good for eatin’ but they are good for cool lighting effects

These are often seen in ‘Edison-like’ LED bulbs, shaped into hearts or stars or just wound around to create a fun or warm lighting effect. They’re made of dozens of micro LED diodes that are bonded together on an ultra flexible metal backing, then coated in colorful silicone for protection. Since the LEDs are in parallel, you only need 3V to light ’em up – we recommend current limiting with a resistor to let max 50mA through.

Comes one per pack. Add some mini, noodle-y neon bling to your miniature sets, dioramas, dollhouses, mini-verses, what have you! These look and feel like what we always wanted out of EL wire, and because they’re just a ‘big long LED’ you can PWM dim them easily.

3. 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.

2. Raspberry Pi Pico W

The Raspberry Pi foundation changed single-board computing when they released the Raspberry Pi computer, now they’re ready to do the same for microcontrollers with the release of the brand new Raspberry Pi Pico W. This low-cost microcontroller board features their powerful new chip, the RP2040, and all the fixin’s to get started with IoT embedded electronics projects at a stress-free price.

Raspberry Pi Pico W brings WiFi + BLE (coming soon) wireless networking to the Pico platform while retaining complete pin compatibility with its older sibling.

1. 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!

We have tutorials on how to wire up the components to create a transistor driver on a breadboard, but its easy to put the diode in backwards, or pick the wrong kind of transistor. And some folks don’t want to have the extra breadboard for just controlling a simple motor fan or solenoid. Which is why we designed the Adafruit STEMMA MOSFET Driver for Motors, Solenoids, and LEDs.