Its a boy!

If you'll recall correctly, in last week's news post I said something along the lines of "Keep an eye out for new PICAXE bundles in the coming week." But I was quickly bound and gagged by a pack of vicious lawn gnomes (packing lawn gnome-sized guns, no less), preventing me from fulfilling the promise.  So […]

Unlike Sparkfun, who actually manage to find fake Atmel ICs, we just get strange batches. The Atmel ATMega328 is the power behind the Arduino/Freeduino/*duino, and we have to set up a programming system to burn the venerable Arduino Bootloader into these chips. We normally use an AVR STK500 in HVSP (high voltage serial programming) mode, […]

We use many, many devices with 0.1" spaced holes, which are pretty much an electronics design standard. We're finding these 0.1" space terminal blocks incredibly useful for making solid, secure, yet serviceable connections to the rest of our designs. We'll often reach for a microcontroller board, then reach for a necessary handful of these parts […]

It's Friday again, and it's been a busy (two) weeks since there was a new product. Wait no more, here it is. 4-Conductor LED Strip Clamp $0.95 Reduce the crazy soldering mess with these super useful RGB LED strip clamps! LilyTwinkle ATtiny85 $6.95 A preprogrammed controller board that can make your wearable project sparkle and […]