NEW PRODUCTS – 8 MHz Ceramic Resonator / Oscillator / 12 MHz Ceramic Resonator / Oscillator / 16 MHz Ceramic Resonator / Oscillator
http://adafru.it/drg

Keep your microcontroller tickin’ with a ceramic oscillator. These little devices are bread-board friendly (0.1″ pin spacing) and easy to use. They act much like crystals with the ‘stability’ capacitors inside. They have 0.5% accuracy, great for every day electronics and microcontroller work and certainly precise enough for UART or other baud-rate generation. For ultra-high precision needs (USB timing, long-term time-keeping, RF/PLL/VCO driving) you may need a crystal or temperate-compensated oscillator.

To use, connect the two outer pins to XTAL-in and XTAL-out on your circuit (they package is symmetric so use whichever outer pin) and the inner pin to ground.

8 MHz - http://adafru.it/drh
12 MHz - http://adafru.it/dri
16 MHz - http://adafru.it/drj

In stock and shipping now!

NEW PRODUCT – Hot Air Soldering Rework Station w/ Three Nozzles
http://adafru.it/drd

If you’ve ever made a mistake when surface-mount soldering, you’ll know how much of a pain it can be to fix it without the right tools. It can add critical time to a project and can seriously dampen your soldering momentum if you run into a bad component or a faulty reflow. With the Quick 957D Soldering Station, you can easily rework your boards and get your project back on track. Its also possible to use solder paste (in a syringe for example) to apply paste and then blow hot air over it to melt the solder and get the components into place.

This essential tool has an internal pump and heater to blow a steady stream of temperature controlled hot air to make it super easy to remove components, fix joints and jumpers, replace missing components, or just correct something you’ve done wrong. The Quick 957D is great for beginners because of it’s low price and relative ease of use, there’s also different nozzles for different sized parts.

It has a closed-loop temperature control range between 100-450°C (212-842°F) and a digital display so you can easily tell what temperature the air’s blowing at. It has a power consumption of 580W and an intelligent cooling system so the airflow remains on until it gets to below 100°C. Max air flow is 100L/minute – but for most work you’ll want to keep it a lot lower than that.

Just make sure to let the rework station heat up all the way before using it and be careful to use tools and not your hands when using as it spits out, well, really hot air. Comes with three nozzles, use the smallest size you can get away with – they help avoid damaging other components if you are trying to isolate one part of the board while avoiding a connector for example.

http://adafru.it/drd
In stock and shipping now!

Plotly + Atlas Scientific: Graph Real-Time Dissolved Oxygen with Raspberry Pi #piday #raspberrypi 
http://adafru.it/b112603

Instructables user plotlygraphs sent in this great project. Thanks for sharing!

Atlas Scientific makes an amazing suite of scientific grade environmental monitoring sensors that have a perfect synergy with the Plotly data visualization platform.

This Instructable will show you how to hook up an Atlas Dissolved Oxygen sensor and a Raspberry Pi to Plotly’s real-time graphing platform. You will view your data in real-time in your web-browser! Here is our final product: A graph of our dissolved oxygen sensor in our Montréal office: http://plot.ly/~streaming-demos/52/!

You can also use Atlas’s pH, ORP, and EC sensors simply by swapping out the appropriate circuit and probe. Calibration functions will vary for each sensor. This will work with the Arduino Yun, Beaglebone Black, or any other embedded linux platform

Read more: http://adafru.it/b112603

Shooting a potato into space using a Raspberry Pi! #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi
http://adafru.it/dr9

Dave Ackerman posted on his blog about a great project he worked on last year- shooting a potato into space using a Raspberry Pi!

This fun project started with a call from a TV production company who were working on a series for Heston Blumenthal. They’d heard that I fly the Raspberry Pi and wanted to include it in their Pie episode. The idea was to fly a potato as that was the first vegetable to be grown in space.

Fast forward a few weeks, we had the challenge of finding a day that had good wind predictions and good weather, and would fit in with the filming schedule and Heston’s diary. Not easy, as you can imagine. However we did find such a day, with Heston available throughout, and I prepared a payload to fly. That needed to contain 3 GoPro cameras, including one looking down and one out sideways, plus a Raspberry Pi to send telemetry and live images from the flight:

Read More
http://adafru.it/dr9

RasPi + PiTFT = Doom #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi
http://adafru.it/b112629

Jae Kim sent in this photo:

_ Playable. Idkfa_

Rpi + PiTFT = Doom

Read More
http://adafru.it/b112629

NEW PRODUCT – TXB0104 Bi-Directional Level Shifter
http://adafru.it/dre

Because the Arduino (and Basic Stamp) are 5V devices, and most modern sensors, displays, flash cards and modes are 3.3V-only, many makers find that they need to perform level shifting/conversion to protect the 3.3V device from 5V. 

Although one can use resistors to make a divider, for high speed transfers, the resistors can add a lot of slew and cause havoc that is tough to debug. For that reason, we like using 4050/74LVX245 series and similar logic to perform proper level shifting. Only problem is that they are only good in one direction which can be a problem for some specialty bi-diectional interfaces and also makes wiring a little hairy. 

That's where this lovely chip, the TXB0104 bi-directional level converter comes in! This chip perform bidirectional level shifting from pretty much any voltage to any voltage and will auto-detect the direction. Only thing that doesn't work well with this chip is i2c (because it uses strong pullups which confuse auto-direction sensor) or control lines with a lot of capacitance on them. If you need to use pullups, you can but they should be at least 50K ohm - the ones internal to AVRs/Arduino are about 100K ohm so those are OK! Its a little more luxurious than a 74LVX245 but if you just don't want to worry about directional pins this is a life saver! 

Since this chip is a special bi-directional level shifter it does not have strong output pins that can drive LEDs or long cables, it's meant to sit on a breadboard between two logic chips! If you do not need instant bi-directional support, we suggest the 74LVX245 as below which has stronger output drive. 

This breakout saves you from having to solder the very fine pitch packages that this chip comes with. We also add 0.1uF caps onto both sides and a 10K pull-up resistor on the output enable pin so you can use it right out of the box!

http://adafru.it/dre
In stock and shipping now!

NEW PRODUCTS – 20mm Coin Cell Breakout w/On-Off Switch (CR2032) / 20mm Coin Cell Breakout Board (CR2032)
http://adafru.it/drc

Simple but effective - this breakout board has a CR2032 coin cell battery holder soldered on and 0.1" pitch breakout pins for easy connecting. Great for powering very low-current projects, or adding a battery backup circuit to a real-time-clock or similar. 

Comes with one fully assembled and tested coin cell battery holder and a small stick of 0.1" header so you can solder it on and plug into a breadboard. Coin cell battery is not included.

There is a version with an on/off switch and a version without it.

Switched - http://adafru.it/dra
Not Switched - http://adafru.it/drb
In stock and shipping now!

How to detect WiFi access points using Raspberry Pi #piday #raspberrypi
http://adafru.it/b112748

Hyperion Bristol‘s blog posted this tutorial on how to detect wifi access points using your Pi.

As you are probably already aware, a certain person decided to smear a large number of highly classified documents over the internet. Part of these documents however included the ‘ANT’ Hardware Catalogue. ANT is a division of the NSA responsible for developing hardware devices and software for use by the ‘Tailored Access Operations’ division. The full catalogue is available from multiple sources – Although This gives a good overview of the capabilities of each device. The one product we’re going to focus on here is called SPARROW-II

As you can see – this system is used as a mobile wireless network (WLAN) detection point.

A small computer intended to be used for WLAN collection, including from UAVs. Hardware: IBM Power PC 405GPR processor, 64 MB SDRAM, 16 MB of built-inflash, 4 mini PCI slots, CompactFlash slot, and 802.11 B/G hardware. Running Linux 2.4 and the BLINDDATE software suite. Unit price (2008): $6K. (Wikipedia)

Another thing to note at the very bottom is the price: $6000 If you’re unsure as to why we might be interested in finding out the locations of wireless networks – Wikipedia explains the concept Here. It’s also a very useful way of profiling a companies exposure during a security assessment. Normally wardriving is conducted from a car (hence the driving). But the SPARROW system allows an aircraft or small UAV to map networks, giving a large amount of capability. It also allows discovery of networks in very sparsely populated areas like, say, deserts… So the obvious thing to do now is to try and build an open-source version of this piece of hardware. Let’s break down exactly what it is we want the system to do:

-Sniff WLANs
-Associate WLANs with a location
-Log the locations
-Operate autonomously (and independant of mains power)

Read more: http://adafru.it/b112748

Impressive Phoenix Force Costume

When Phoenix got armor in Marvel's Avengers Alliance game, cosplayer Yaya Han knew she had to make the costume. Read about how the costume was built: http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2014/05/09/impressive-phoenix-force-costume/

#Cosplay   #costuming   #xmen