Adafruit’s Top Ten New Products of 2024 #AdafruitTopTen

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

10. Adafruit Pixel Shifter – For Addressable LEDs

We’ve been stocking WS2811-n-friends for a long time, enough to see many iterations and versions of the “one-wire-control” addressable LED pixel. We call them NeoPixels since the part number itself can change quite a bit, but all have the same idea: send color data to lights, and they’ll change on their own without having to constantly PWM three or four diodes. Despite this simplicity, we’ve seen folks struggle with them because of voltage level expectations: some NeoPixel-compatible pixels are very picky and want 5V logic level. Without the right voltage, you get flickering or weird behavior. There are also some funky variants, like the TM1814, that want inverted signal levels.

9. Adafruit HDC3022 Precision Temperature & Humidity Sensor

We stock a large number of Temperature/Humidity sensors, so you’re probably wondering why another one? Well, this Adafruit HDC3022 Precision Temperature & Humidity Sensor breakout features the highest accuracy & precision one we’ve seen so far! It has the TI HDC302x series chip with typical 0.5% accuracy for the RH sensor (with 0.19% long-term drift) and ±0.1°C typical accuracy for the temperature sensor. All at a very nice price.

New! As of September 23, 2024 – We’ve upgraded this sensor to the “HDC3022” rather than the “HDC3021”. It is completely the same other than it now has a white PTFE filter cover that should not be removed and will keep your sensor nice and clean.

8. USB C Small Round Panel Mount Extension Cable

If you need to add a compact panel-mount connection but don’t have the time or ability to cut a custom oval or square hole, this USB C Small Round Panel Mount Extension Cable is the easiest and fastest way to panel-ify your project. The adapter can fit holes 12mm to 18mm, so you can drill in your wood, plastic, or metal with a common hole-saw or bit, no special shapes or filing required. Un-screw the plastic nut, insert the plug, and re-attach. Ta-da! Now you have a USB C jack and USB C plug for connecting any cable.

7. Adafruit USB Type C Plug Breakout

Throw out all those Mini and Micro B USB cables you have in a plastic bin – the next generation of USB connectors is here with USB C! You’ve seen these connectors pop up on all sorts of devices as the industry moves from micro B or lightning to the new standard. Well, at least until the next standard comes out.

USB C features a symmetric/reversible connector, more data pins, and higher current output capability. But, for most developers, the pin usage you know and love from older USB will work just fine. This breakout gives you all the necessary basics and a resistor configuration to ensure you get 5V power. We chose a plug that has a semi-through hole mounting configuration that seems fairly mechanically stable. That said, it will not survive purposeful bending like a Type A would.

6. Adafruit Feather RP2350 with HSTX Port

RP2350 flies high with the Feather format – now you can use any FeatherWings with this battery-powered dev board. It comes with 8MB of flash, a 22-pin HSTX output port, Stemma QT, debug SWD, and an optional PSRAM spot. It’s our first RP2350 board and we crammed a ton of goodies into our classic Feather format. It’s an excellent starter board to go along with your Pico 2.

The RP2350 is Raspberry Pi’s second microcontroller chip following their breakout-hit the RP2040. Building on their success, the RP2350 upgrades the dual M0 core to dual M33 cores with 150 MHz clock rate. The M33 is a much newer Arm chipset; we’ve found that firmware runs about twice as fast. Especially given that we now have hardware floating point support. Also, the RP2350 has twice as much SRAM: 520KB instead of 264KB, which means that micropython/circuitpython runs great, and also IoT projects that need a lot of memory buffer space will run better. Other improvements include 3 PIO blocks instead of 2, TrustZone secure boot, and a special High Speed Transmit (HSTX) peripheral that drives 4 lanes of differential data transmission, such as DVI output without needing to overclock or use PIO.

5. Adafruit bq25185 USB / DC / Solar Lithium Ion/Polymer charger

We’re always on the look out for better ways to make projects portable: being able to charge your battery in the most convenient manner will let projects run no matter what power is available. The Adafruit bq25185 USB / DC / Solar Charger Board uses the new bq25185 is a nifty charger chip, which has a lot of flexibility for different kinds of batteries (LiPoly, LiIon or LiFePO4), charging rates (250mA, 500mA, or 1A) and power sources (USB, DC or solar). It’s also a great value, so it’s a good upgrade from MCP73833 or MCP73831-based charger boards.

4. Adafruit I2S MEMS Microphone Breakout – ICS-43434

Listen to this good news – we now have a breakout board for a super tiny ICS43434 I2S MEMS microphone. Just like ‘classic’ electret microphones, MEMS mics can detect sound and convert it to voltage, but they’re way smaller and thinner. This microphone doesn’t even have analog out; it’s purely digital. The I2S is a small, low-cost MEMS mic with a range of about 50Hz – 15KHz, good for all general audio recording/detection. The chip has a built-in low-pass filter that cuts frequencies above 24KHz.

3. Adafruit I2C Stemma QT Rotary Encoder Breakout with Encoder

Rotary encoders are soooo much fun! Twist ’em this way, then twist them that way. Unlike potentiometers, they go all the way around and often have little detents for tactile feedback. But, if you’ve ever tried to add encoders to your project you know that they’re a real challenge to use: timers, interrupts, debouncing…

This Stemma QT breakout makes all that frustration go away – it even has a pre-soldered ‘standard’ PEC11-pinout rotary encoder with a push-switch. The onboard microcontroller is programmed with our seesaw firmware and will track all pulses and pins for you and then save the incremental value for querying over I2C. Plug it in with a Stemma QT cable for instant rotary goodness, with any microcontroller from an Arduino UNO up to a Raspberry Pi.

2. Adafruit CH334F Mini 4-Port USB Hub Breakout

Sometimes you’ve got something with USB host, like an embedded Linux board, and you want to connect more than one thing. Or maybe you want to turn something like a keyboard into a multi-device USB peripheral. The Adafruit CH334F Mini 4-Port USB Hub Breakout will do that for you! it features a CH334F USB 2.1 hub chip which converts one high-speed port into four.

1. Raspberry Pi Pico 2W

Raspberry Pi Pico 2W is Raspberry Pi Foundation’s update to their popular RP2040-based wireless ico board, now built on RP2350: their new high-performance, secure microcontroller. With a higher core clock speed, double the on-chip SRAM (512KB), double the on-board flash memory (4MB!), more powerful Arm M33 cores, new security and low-power features, and upgraded interfacing capabilities, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 delivers a significant performance and feature boost while retaining hardware and software compatibility with earlier members of the Raspberry Pi Pico series.