New Parts

Here's our late and lame Friday post. It features one very lonely, depressed, and forgotten product from a week ago. But it blinks, so it can't be that sad, right? 5V RGB LED LPD8806 Stripxels (32 per meter) $35.00 These are very similar to the WS2801 RGB Stripxel, but feature the LPD8806 controller IC instead. […]

Glorious MIDI unicorn It looks good and it sounds good - a challenging project by musician Andrew Huang. (Via LaughingSquid) Color changing hair dye Thermochromic hair color, apparently safe and non-permanent, soon as a commercial product. (Via ZMEScience) Dazzling canopy of interactive moving lights Teamlab's stunning light and sound show creates an illusion of ethereal […]

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, […]

After a long hiatus, our PP3 chisel-tip pogo pins are back! And it looks like they're here to stay, so no more drop-outs in supply. I know that we use them for robotics applications, but there's a lot of people using them for other electronics purposes. Now you can get them reliably, and in quantity, […]