A breakout board for your Android phone

ioio

[sparkfun] announced a new board called the IOIO (pronounced "yo-yo") this week that allows communication from your Android devices to your upcoming projects. The board hasn't been released yet; [sparkfun] is still pulling together documentation and waiting on their first production run. We do know that the board contains a PIC24F MCU, and will give your phone analog input,  and Digital … [Read more...]

Retake on a Wii remote controlled balancing robot

wii-mote-controlled-balancing-robot

[Tijmen Verhulsdonck] built his own version of a Wii remote-controlled balancing robot. He drew his inspiration from the SegWii, which was built by [Ara Kourchians]. The body is built using one of our preferred fabrication methods; threaded rod makes up a rail system, with three sheets of hard board serving as a mounting structure for the motors, electronics, and battery. This does away with … [Read more...]

SPARKFUNS HAS DA KEWT KITTY PARADES OF STUF

sparkfunkit1

HAY GUISE! SPARKFUN ADDED AWESUM NEW STUF 2DAY. DA PICTURZ WERE SUPER BORING NERD STUF SO I ADDED SUM AWESOME KITTEHS TO THEM. THA WUN ABUV IZ AN ADORUBLE RED HAIRED KITTEH OVER DA SPARKFUN SOLDERING IRON KIT! IT'S SUPER KEWLS FOR SURE. … [Read more...]

Portable bench supply carries around 10 amp-hours of juice

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

[Punish3r] wanted to have power for prototyping on the go. What he came up with is this little thing above. Inside you'll find common components that let the unit provide 10 amp hours of current with a 12V 500mA output. The storage capacity is provided by a dozen Lithium batteries. These 3.7V cheapies are wired in parallel behind a protection board. For charging and discharging, a … [Read more...]

Sparkfun free day recap

FreeDay-Logo-G

It looks like the dust has finally settled with sparkfun's free day. They managed to give away $150,541 to users and $22,988 to charity.  The general idea is you could ether take $10/year you've been a sparkfun customer, or take a 10 question quiz and earn $10/correct answer plus some money for charity. It looks like some technical difficulties prevented people from taking the quiz until free … [Read more...]

SparkFun free day 2011: now with gambling

sparkfun-free-day-2011

SparkFun has just announced a Free Day for 2011. Last year was the first time they decided to give away $100,000 in the form of $100 credits that melted down their servers and made the rest of the world (you know, the non-geek sort) ask what SparkFun was when it started trending on Twitter, Google, and every other form of digital communication. Well, they're doing it again this year, albeit … [Read more...]

Project enclosures the right way

creating-enclosures

[Stephen Eaton] created an enclosure and shared his process in a pair of blog post. We thought is was amusing that he remarks on how rarely his projects get the to point that you'd want to make an enclosure for them. We've certainly got a lot of bare-PCB creations lying around. But when it does come time, we think his fabrication method is a good way to go. First of all, he didn't start from … [Read more...]