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 flat to pick up components without risk of scratching or twisting, 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.
If you need to add a panel-mount connection for telephone-interfacing projects but don’t have the time or ability to cut a custom oval or square hole, this RJ-12 or RJ-11 Telephone Round Panel Mount Plug is the easiest and fastest way to panel-ify your existing phone kit. It’s about 30mm in diameter so that you can drill a hole in your wood, plastic or metal with a common hole-saw or bit, no special shapes or filing required. Unscrew the plastic nut, insert the plug, and re-attach. Ta-da: Now you have a pass-through RJ-12 jack.
The Adafruit S-35710 Wake Up Timer is a low power ‘watchdog timer’ chip that can be programmed to alert with a digitally-configurable alarm from 1 second up to 194 days, thanks to a 24-bit second counter. It’s an interesting alternative to a real time clock or internal sleep timer and might be useful for some ultra-low-power projects that want to have a separate (and possibly separately-powered) chip to handle time-keeping and alarms. We covered this component on EYE ON NPI and thought it would make for a nice breakout in the shop.
What a cutie pie! Or is it… a QT Py? This diminutive dev board comes with a throwback processor – an 8-bit 8051! This tiny core is a big change from something like the the ESP32-S3 QT Py with two 240MHz 32-bit cores, but there’s lots of folks interested in the CH552 and given the smol size, it is a nice matchup for a smol board.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: New Python Releases, an ESP32+MicroPython IDE and Much More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
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