Sparkfun.com

Technical Programming
1

This is electronics, but its more sensor side of things so I think that the programmers will be worrying about the sensors more than anyone else, so I put this here.

For those of you who don’t know, www.sparkfun.com has lots of good things to use. In the senors section, many combinations of accelerometers, gyros, already on breakout boards. In the wireless communication section, wireless radios (we cant use them in the competition, but its still fun to think of things we can do with them on our own :D). In IC’s > exotic, floating point math co-processors that could be useful to free up some cycles for other things… They also have very cheap SSOP and SOIC adaptors. Less than $3 for most of the adaptors. I cant find them on the side column directly, but on the IC’s> exotics page there is links to them with quite a few of the products, so it should be that hard to find.

Hopefully this helps someone.

EDIT: oh and if anyone is wondering… I’m not related to them in any way… Just impressed with what they have.

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They have some very neat products - and at very affordable prices. The IMU board would be particularly useful for FIRST applications. The rotary dial gsm phones that take a SIM card are neat too, but I can’t imagine spending $400 on one (or $500 for a red one)

The first time I had heard of them was from Kevin Watson at the kickoff presentations last year, but now I hear people talking about them more and more. One of my professors even recommended them as a virtual “one-stop-shop” for any cheap RF communication, just the other day. I’ve been pretty tempted to pickup one of their serial port to bluetooth adapters.