Adafruit New Products this Week: Featuring the Adafruit Infrared IR Remote Receiver!

Browse through all that’s new here!

NEW PRODUCTS THIS WEEK

ELECFREAKS Smart Cutebot Pro Programming Robot Car for micro:bit: This fully assembled and ready-to-rock robot smart car is the nicest we’ve seen and is incredibly easy to use with a micro:bit and MakeCode. It comes all ready to go, no soldering or screw-driver required. Simply plug in your :bit into the top slot and add a (not included) 18650 Lithium Ion battery to get moving.

The newly upgraded Cutebot Pro no longer needs a lithium battery expansion pack. It carries a lithium battery box and supports any 18650-sized battery.

The Cutebot Pro is a rear-drive smart car driven by dual high-speed motors, which can zip around your floor. It has an ultrasonic distance sensor to avoid colliding with walls, two RGB LED headlights and two underlights, two line-tracking light sensors, an active buzzer to make beeps and tones, and various headers for attaching additional servos and sensors.

Note: Does not include micro:bit or 18650 Battery. This is just the Cutebot kit by itself!

Fine Tip ESD Plastic Point Tweezers: You’ll need a good pair of tweezers when soldering delicate surface-mount (SMD/SMT) components. These are a great pair of everyday tweezers. They’re anti-static and anti-magnetic, with a sturdy stainless steel body and ESD plastic tips. The tips are fine and pointy to pick up components without risk of scratching, but because they are plastic, they’re not good for holding parts during hot air rework, or if you’re going to get close with your soldering iron.

Adafruit BNO055 + BMP280 BFF Add-On for QT Py: Our QT Py boards are a great way to make very small microcontroller projects that pack a ton of power – and now we have a way for you to turn many QT Py boards into powerful 9 degree-of-freedom (9DoF) motion plus pressure/altitude sensing projects that are super small!

We call this the Adafruit BNO055 + BMP280 BFF—a “Best Friend Forever.” When you were a kid, you may have learned about the “buddy” system; well, this product is kind of like that! It’s a board that will watch your QT Py’s back and give it more capabilities.

This PCB is designed to fit onto the back of any QT Py or Xiao board. It can be soldered into place or made removable using pin and socket headers.

Adafruit TSSP77038 38KHz Infrared IR Demodulator Breakout – STEMMA JST PH 2mm: While designing our IR decoding breakout we noticed the TSSP series of chips from Vishay, these are simpler than more ‘remote control’ receivers in that they don’t do any filtering on the codes received: you really just get the demodulated-from-38KHz-signal output.

According to Vishay, they’re designed for “Reflective Sensing, Light Barriers, and Fast Proximity Applications”. These sensors could be interesting for use when you want a less-‘intelligent’ IR decoder, or for proximity projects where you don’t want to go all-out for a VCNL I2C sensor. These are good for creating break-beams where the IR light is modulated rather than just solid on, because you won’t be affected by other IR signals or ambient light changes.

This board will work nicely for a variety of IR detecting projects, and with mounting holes and a cable, a lot easier to mount in enclosures and on devices. Using a 2mm pitch STEMMA JST PH cable with headers or alligator clips on the end, you can easily wire this board without any soldering.

Adafruit Infrared IR Remote Receiver – STEMMA JST PH 2mm: A year ago we designed a high-current-output Infrared Transmitter STEMMA which makes it easy to create high-powered IR LED blasters. Now we’ve sat down to design the other side, the super sensitive wide-range Adafruit Infrared IR Remote Receiver with two selectable IR receiver chips.

We found plenty of 38KHz receiver sensors that would work nicely on this breakout board – but when it came to choosing one that was vertical or horizontal we just couldn’t make up our mind…so why not both? We’ve placed one on the end and one in the middle, and a slide switch to select which one you want to read signal from. We can’t just tie the outputs together because they’d ‘fight’ each other and give incoherent output – but if you’re willing to solder two wires, it’s possible to read each one independently thanks to labelled breakout pads.

Usage is simple: Power the board by connecting V+ and ground to 3~5VDC, point a 38KHz remote control at the sensors and press some buttons. The demodulated IR envelope is piped out the Signal pin into your microcontroller which will then need to decode it. To make usage really easy, we have a green ‘power good’ LED and a red ‘signal’ LED. When IR remote signals are read by the onboard sensors, the red LED will blink to let you know.

This board will work nicely for a variety of IR remote receiving projects, and with mounting holes and a cable, a lot easier to mount in enclosures and on devices. Using a 2mm pitch STEMMA JST PH cable with headers or alligator clips on the end, you can easily wire this board without any soldering.