New Product Roundup – April 13th

Happy Saturday – we are back with another weekly New Product Roundup! This week we have a couple new products for building your first robot, a sensor to help your plants from dying, and a couple new cables. We also have a new product of the week – let’s go have a look!

New Products
To start, we have the Adafruit CRICKIT for micro:bit – this is the perfect add-on for the BBC micro:bit and will have you building your first robot in no time! As always, this Adafruit board has an excellent set of resources. Continuing with the robot theme, we have a new continuous rotation servo – these make excellent drive systems for simple robots and don’t require complex motor controllers. We also have a new Soil Moisture Sensor from Adafruit, these are a capacitive designed sensor hand will not corrode over time in the damp ground. For the soil moisture sensor we also have a handy breakout cable that allows the soil moisture sensor to be connected to any standard male breakaway pins. Finally, we have fancy new multimeter leads with detachable alligator clip ends – a must have!

Product Of The Week
Product of the week is our Weatherproof Ultrasonic Distance Sensor . This Ultrasonic Sensor features a weather resistant sensor housing for outdoor applications. 15% Off until Friday at Midnight!

Adafruit CRICKIT for micro:bit

Have you ever wanted to build your own robot? Don’t know where to start? The Adafruit CRICKIT for micro:bit is the perfect add-on for getting started in robotics. The CRICKET gives the BBC micro:bit the ability to reach out and interact with the world through sensors, motors, lights, and sounds. Just plug your :bit into the 40 pin edge connector and start creating!

Micro Servo – SG90 (360 degrees)

This factory modified version of the extremely common SG90 servo is a very basic continuous rotation servo. The servo offers an inexpensive and easy to control method of getting your small turret spinning or miniature robot moving. This servo can work with both 5 V and 3.3 V servo signals and has a standard servo connector.

JST PH 4-Pin to Female Socket Cable

This simple breakout cable converts a JST PH 4-pin cable into 4 individual wires with high-quality 0.1″ female sockets on the end. We’re carrying these cables so you can connect the Adafruit STEMMA Soil Moisture Sensor to any standard male breadboard pin connection.

Adafruit STEMMA Capacitive Moisture Sensor

The Adafruit STEMMA Soil moisture sensor is a durable capacitive moisture sensor compatible with just about any microcontroller / single board computer. Most low cost soil sensors are resistive style, where there’s two prongs and the sensor measures the conductivity between the two. These work OK at first, but eventually start to oxidize because of the exposed metal and have to be re-calibrated over time. This capacitive sensor is far superior as they work far better in loose soil, don’t introduce DC current into your plants, and don’t have any exposed metal to corrode.

Multimeter Probes + Alligator Clips

When we saw this set of multimeter probes with detachable alligator clips we knew they were a must have! These probes have threaded collars that allow the included alligator clip attachments to thread right on to the end of the probe nice and secure. No extra messing about or additional opportunities for shorts / bad connections with cables connected to cables.

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Product Of The Week – 15% Off


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New Tutorial!


Raspberry Pi Irrigation Control – Part 2
In part two of this four part tutorial we will boot up the Raspberry Pi, do some initial configuration of the Raspbian operating system, install Python libraries for a few of the sensors, and write some basic Python code to trigger each solenoid and read and display the data from each of the sensors. Interested? Head on over to the tutorial!

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