Turning Oops! into – Hey cool!
I recently got a shipment of boards for our brand new breadboard power supplies. Excited as always to assemble a new design, I loaded up one of the panels with all 270 parts (!) and sent it off to the reflow oven. Historically I’ve had excellent results with our reflow setup here, but this time I ran things a little differently to accomodate the larger than typical panel size. In the end, the panel was overheated a bit and discolored the solder mask. The boards have been tested and appear to work correctly, but I dont want to sell them as new - we believe in top notch products here, and strive to make our core product line reflect that.
After tweeting about the experience in the morning, I was surprised to get a bunch of positive tweets back from kind folks suggesting that I maybe sell them, but at a reduced cost for anyone who might want to get a deal on these – the slightly flambéed version. So i’ve gone ahead and created a bit of a “reservation form” where you can enter your email address and the quantity you’re interested in. I’ve only got 30 in the batch, so once all 30 are reserved, i’ll take down the form. I’ll send out invoices via PayPal to those who make reservations that are to be filled. These normally sell for $18.99 – but these 30 will be going for only $12 each including shipping anywhere USPS First Class mail can go (international too!). They will come with all surface mount parts soldered to the board – you’ll just need to solder the two included header pins to the board .
So if you’re interested, here’s a link to the form where you can enter a reservation. Thank you in advance!
MAX31855 Unobtanium – and our thermocouple board’s roadmap
Our MAX31855 Thermocouple to Digital interface boards have been quite popular, and just last week we ran out of stock. I had been working on revisions to the board design, and had a new version ready to go when I went to my typical suppliers for the IC and noticed they all had it marked as out of stock with a 27 week factory lead time! I put in an order with Maxim-Ic ASAP hoping with my smaller quantity order i could get a few in a shorter window, but the on dock date came back as August 1st. So it would seem this IC, specifically the MAX31855KASA has returned to its previous status of “unobtanium” for the time being – and a long time being at that! I’m surprised with the popularity of this IC, that stock wasn’t kept up at higher levels to avoid this issue, but I digress.
Check out the ClockTHREEjr by Wyolum
ClockTHREEjr
The fine folks over at Wyolum.com have a really cool new product in the works, the ClockTHREEjr. This new design has 128 individually addressable LEDs and they say it even fits in the 9″ by 9″ IKEA RIBBA frame. The finished version looks amazing!
To help fund the project and meet minimum build quantities they’re running a KickStarter campaign. The campaign has a lot of reasonable pledge rewards and is definitely worth checking out.
You can read more on the KickStarter campaign page for the ClockTHREEjr or on their website
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Breakout board for the EM3242 Rotation Angle Sensor
If you’ve ever wanted to measure the rotation of a magnet, this is your sensor!
The EM3242 Rotation Angle Sensor IC is a contact-less sensor which can measure the angle of a magnet mounted or held close to it. As the magnet is rotated clockwise, the voltage output from the sensor decreases. You can use this to correlate the angle of the magnet based on that output voltage. The board is marked with the 0 degree North position, which is active when the south pole of your magnet is oriented in that direction. Be sure to check out the data sheet for the EM3242 for more details.
The sensor can be powered by 5vdc, and works great when connected to an analog pin on an Arduino, ChipKit or just about any micro controller.
This is an Open Source Hardware design, under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license. You can download the design files here.
You can find this and other cool products in our online store.