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NEW PRODUCTS THIS WEEK
Tumblr Etched R4 Keycap for MX Compatible Switches
Here’s a super-classy, custom-made Etched Tumblr Keycap. It’s made with translucent/opaque plastic etched to create a dreamy, elegant glow-through effect. Perfect for showing your cultural community posting cred on your next mechanical keyboard project.
Snaps onto any Cherry MX or compatible switch. Since the logo is centered, you’ll get a glow whether you have north or south-facing switches. It’s R4 profile so will work nicely as a stand-alone key or at the top row of your keyboards.
Note: This product is a single keycap, and key switches are not included!
Ultra Flexible 5V Natural White LED Strip – 320 LEDs per meter – 1 meter long – 4000K Color
Here at Adafruit, we love discovering new and exotic glowing things. Like moths to the flame, we were intrigued by these ‘chip on board’ ultra-flexible white LED Strips with a whopping 320 SMT LEDs per meter, soldered side-by-side and diffused with a thin silicone epoxy! They look a lot like neon or incandescent tubing or maybe really nice EL wire, but without the need for expensive transformers, glass tubing, or inert gasses. The strip itself is only 5mm wide, the casing is 8mm wide but can be removed.
Unlike addressable neopixel-dot strips, these lights have a continuous, light source, and unlike our ‘Neon’ tubing, they’re much thinner and more flexible (but don’t have a chunky diffused look) The trade-off for having a thin silicone cover and non-diffused tubing casing is that close up you can see the little hot spots between LEDs.
The silicone casing makes for a strong, durable, weather-proof casing. They’re not guaranteed for dunking underwater or long-term outdoor exposure, but they’re durable enough for outdoor projects like costumes, bike lighting, or festival decorations. Plus, with the adhesive backing, you can stick it where you please.
Available in Natural White and Pink!
Adafruit UPDI Friend – USB Serial UPDI Programmer
UPDI stands for Unified Program and Debug Interface, but this board is so smol and cute that we will call it the Unusually Playful Device Interfacer and pat its head when it does a good job. It’s designed to make programming modern ATtiny chips very easy because it has 3V or 5V power and logic select, power and transmit indicator LEDs, and a quick cable for poking into a breadboard.
We have been working a lot with ATtiny816, ATtiny817 and ATtiny1616 chips lately, as for our seesaw boards. And we’re often needing to program them with a CP2102-based breakout with a 1K resistor soldered between the RX and TX pins. But we were hankering for a nicer programmer!
Adafruit CAN Bus BFF Add-On for QT Py
Our QT Py boards are a great way to make very small microcontroller projects that pack a ton of power – and now we have a way for you to turn many QT Py boards into powerful CAN bus devices that are super small!
CAN Bus is a small-scale networking standard, originally designed for cars and, yes, busses, but is now used for many robotics or sensor networks that need better range and addressing than I2C, and don’t have the pins or computational ability to talk on Ethernet. CAN is 2 wire differential, which means it’s good for long distances and noisy environments.
Messages are sent at about 1Mbps rate – you set the frequency for the bus and then all ‘joiners’ must match it, and have an address before the packet so that each node can listen in to messages just for it. New nodes can be attached easily because they just need to connect to the two data lines anywhere in the shared net. Each CAN devices sends messages whenever it wants, and thanks to some clever data encoding, can detect if there’s a message collision and retransmit later.
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