Weekly Roundup #32 - New Maker Products // News

A lot has happened while I was on holidays over the last two weeks. So I’ve split up my regular roundup into two to avoid people falling asleep half way through. This video contains all the crowd funding products.

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Maker Shops

Tindie

Tindie has been fairly busy while I’ve been away on holidays.

High Tech E-paper IoT door sign

This board is a neat idea. It’s a baseboard that allows you to connect an ESP8266 and 4.3" e-ink display. Useful if you want to have door signs that can be updated programmatically.

Drumlights

And just had to add this one in as I’m a drummer. It’s an Arduino Nano shield that drives 5V RGB LED strips and on-board Piezo. So, you can activate the LEDs in sync with your drums. Nice addition to an acoustic kit.

ESP8266 RFM95 Lorawan Node

This is a fairly cheap ESP8266 PCB with on-board RFM95 LoRa module and LiPo battery management. You’ll still have to buy your own LoRa module and ESP8266, but a cheap option if you want a DIY LoRa to WiFi gateway.

8-Channel Voltage Logger with SD-card

There seems to be a few of these test PCBs on Tindie. This small board is an 8 channel voltage logger with sampling rates from 500nS to 5 seconds. Runs off a 5 to 20 volt DC supply with input channel voltage from 0 to 3.3 volts only.

RFM95W 915MHz Module for Arduino

One of the problems with a lot of the LoRa modules is the fact that they have a 2mm pad pitch. For prototyping you’ll need an adapter board or you can get one of these modules that have been soldered up for you.

TEENSY v4.2 with Wifi, Bluetooh and NRF24L01

Do you need to add wireless to your Teensy project? This board will accept any of the Teensy version below 3.2 and provide WiFi, Bluetooth and nRF24L01 connectivity. It also has 5v and 3.3 volt regulators and can be powered from a 6.5 to 16V DC supply.

Raspberry PI0W Lora Shield

Another Hat for your Pi Zero, although can be used on any Pi. This one allows you to solder up a LoRa module and OLED display. The only thing missing is LiPo battery management which would have extended the number of applications.

LoRa Hat for Raspberry Pi Zero

Aaand yet another LoRa hat for the Pi. This one runs the RN2903 LoRa module.

STM32L082+SX1276 LoRa

And, yup, yet another LoRa PCB, this one contains an STM32 MCU as well as an SX1276 LoRa module. Power can be supplied from either USB or LiPo.

ReflowR

If you saw my MickMakeMail number 8 you would have seen the ReflowR. Lafras now has a Tindie shop open where you can buy his excellent ReflowR.

Grid-Eye 8 x 8 IR Array

The AMG8833 Grid-Eye is a fairly new product that provides a small 8 by 8 pixel thermal camera. You can fetch the thermal image at up to 10Hz with a 60 degree field of view with very simple code.

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AdaFruit, Seeed, SparkFun, DFRobot, DigiKey

Adafruit Feather 32u4 Bluefruit

I’m sure AdaFruit have had this for a while, but anyway. This is the Feather 32u4 which contains, of course, and ATmega32U4, LiPo battery management and an nRF51822 Bluetooth module. These feather modules have been a great idea from AdaFruit. They give you a common set of features and pinouts but have a whole lot of different MCU and wireless options.

Qwiic Micro OLED

Over at SparkFun they’re really getting into these Qwiic modules and have products like a 64 by 48 OLED display …

Qwiic UV Sensor - ZOPT2201

… a UV and ambient light sensor …

Qwiic Mux - PCA9548A

… an I2C bus mux for when you have a lot of I2C devices or devices with clashing addresses …

Qwiic Human Presence Sensor - AK9752

… and human presence sensor based on the AK9750 chip …

Arduino Tian

The Arduino Tian is a board that contains a CortexM0+ SAMD21 MCU, WiFi module and a Qualcomm AR9342 MIPS processor with 4G eMMC and 64M DDR2 RAM. This is the type of board you’d use in an IoT gateway as it has Bluetooth, WiFi, Ethernet and capable of running OpenWRT.

GPS Receiver Module SMD - S1315F

If you want some cheap GPS modules then SparkFun have a huge stock of them on sale at the moment. I actually picked up a handful of these for a project I have in mind. Only 11 bucks! Cheap as chips!

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The Cheap Side

Over in China …

Mini Solar/Lipo Charger Board

… EleCrow has a small LiPo charger that can charge using solar or USB inputs.

TCS230 Color Recognition Sensor

While BangGood have a color recognition sensor using the TCS230 sensor. It’ll detect non-luminous color up to 1cm away and runs off a 3 to 5 volt supply.

PM2.5 Air Quality Detection Sensor Module

and this laser dust sensor seems to have a slightly faster acquisition time than the previous model I bought. It’s still a little slow at 1s response time, but can measure down to 0.3 micron particle size. Wow!

Geekworm AC85V~220V Temperature Humidity Smart Wi-Fi Switch

Over at DX they have a copy of the Sonoff devices, which has exactly the same specs, but for some reason is around the same price. So someone hasn’t been doing their research at DX.

NANOPI NEO2

And I found that they are also selling the NanoPi NEO2 for around the same price as you can get it elsewhere. This is the H5 model not the H3 model.

Monster Motor Shield for Arduino

And this fairly cheap motor shield module claims to be able to drive a single 16V motor at up to 30A. Hmmm. Not sure about that. I would expect the magic smoke genie to appear all of a sudden.