New Products 1/17/24 Featuring the Adafruit Feather nRF52840 Sense!

Browse through all that’s new here!

NEW PRODUCTS THIS WEEK

Adafruit Grove and Stemma QT FeatherWing for all Feathers: The Adafruit Grove and Stemma QT FeatherWing for all Feathers allows folks to use many Grove devices with Feather boards! It fits nicely on top and has 3x Analog/Digital connectors, 1x UART connector and 2x I2C connectors. Not a ton, but enough to get many small projects going! We even managed to fit a vertical Stemma QT port on the end for another I2C connection.

Medium Surface Transducer with Wires – 4 Ohm 3 Watt: Turn any surface/wall/table etc into a speaker with a surface transducer. This type of speaker does not have a moving cone like most speakers you’ve seen. Instead, a small metal rod is wrapped with the voice coil. When current is pulsed through the coil, the magnetic field causes a piece of metal to expand and contract – and if it’s pressed against a surface it turns the transducer into a speaker!

Large Premium Solderless Breadboard: For really big projects, give yourself some room to work in, with a massive 2250-point breadboard – equivalent in size to three full-sized breadboards side by side.

The breadboards are mounted onto a metal plate and comes with 4 colored posts you can use with a bench-top supply. Four bumpers are included, to keep the board from slipping around your desk.

As of Dec 19, 2023 – This breadboard has been updated to Premium, making plugging and unplugging boards and headers a buttery-smooth operation thanks to upgraded spring clips.

Compact Switching Power Supply – Selectable Output 3-12VDC: Wow, is this not the most useful thing you did not know existed or what? It’s a switching wall adapter where you can easily change the voltage! It’s like a benchtop supply you can take with you anywhere.

This model is 10 Watts and has 6 selectable outputs ranging from 3V to 12VDC and up to 1.5A output. It has a 2-prong plug but takes 110VAC to 240VAC so you can use it anywhere with a simple plug adapter.

TT Motor Bi-Metal Gearbox Double Sided Axle and 1:90 Gear Ratio: These durable (but affordable!) gearbox motors (also known as ‘TT’ motors) are an easy, low-cost way to get your projects moving. This is a TT DC Bi-Metal Gearbox Motor with a gear ratio of 1:90, about double the ‘standard’ 1:48 ratio. That gives them higher torque but slower rotational speed. Since they’re slower, they’re good for robots where strength is more important than speed.

They look a lot like our yellow all-plastic-gearbox motors, but these have the output-half of the motor gears machined from steel, so they won’t strip as easily, and they’re twice as slow (and twice as powerful) given their lower gearbox ratio. The metal gears also mean they’re louder when running.

2V 0.3W Mini Solar Panel – ETFE – Voltaic P121: These panels come to us from Voltaic Systems, makers of fine solar-powered bags and packs. These are waterproof, scratch-resistant, and UV-resistant, and they use four high-efficiency monocrystalline SunPower cells with 22+% efficiency (praise the sun!). The panel is made of 4 cells with a nominal voltage of 0.5V each, so we call this a “2V” panel

They output a nominal 2V at 150 mA peak via two solder-able pads on the back. The panel is constructed with ETFE (Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene), making it extremely durable and resistant to environmental elements, a superior upgrade to PET or laminate solar panel construction. They can easily stand up to typical outdoor use, including being dropped and leaned on.

5V 0.3W Mini Solar Panel – ETFE – Voltaic P122: Each cell has a nominal voltage of 0.5V so we call this a “5V” panel. Note the datasheet has it down as a 6V panel, because at max-power-point it will give you 5.9V

They output approximately 6V at 50 mA peak via two solder-able pads on the back.

5V 0.6W Mini Solar Panel – ETFE – Voltaic – P123: Each cell has a nominal voltage of 0.5V, so we call this a “5V” panel. Note the datasheet has it down as a 6V panel, because at max-power-point it will give you 6.1V

They output approximately 6V at 120 mA peak via two solder-able pads on the back.

Adafruit Feather nRF52840 Sense: The Adafruit Feather Bluefruit Sense takes our popular Feather nRF52840 Express and adds a smorgasbord of sensors to make a great wireless sensor platform. This Feather microcontroller comes with Bluetooth Low Energy and native USB support featuring the nRF52840! This Feather is an ‘all-in-one’ Arduino-compatible + Bluetooth Low Energy with built in USB plus battery charging. With native USB it works great with CircuitPython, too.

Like the Feather nRF52840, this chip comes with Arduino IDE support – you can program the nRF52840 chip directly to take full advantage of the Cortex-M4 processor, and then calling into the Nordic SoftDevice radio stack when you need to communicate over BLE. Since the underlying API and peripherals are the same for the ‘832 and ‘840, you can supercharge your older nRF52832 projects with the same exact code, with a single recompile!

This Feather is also a BLE-friendly CircuitPython board!