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TTL Serial Camera

This guide is for our new TTL serial camera module with NTSC video output. These modules are a nice addition to a microcontroller project when you want to take a photo or control a video stream. The modules have a few features built in, such as the ability to change the brightness/saturation/hue of images, auto-contrast and auto-brightness adjustment, and motion detection.

EL Wire

Working with Electroluminescent Wire

EL Wire, also known as Electroluminescent wire, is a stiff wire core coated with phosphor and then covered with a protective PVC sheath. When an AC signal is applied to it, it glows a cool neon color. Find out how to solder, power, and work with EL Wire in your next project.

Hacking the Kinect

Reverse engineering the Microsoft Kinect

Here's a step by step guide on how you can reverse engineer a Microsoft Kinect for the Xbox 360.

BeagleBone

Tutorials for the TI embedded Linux board

New from the fine people who have brought us the Beagle Board, we now have a smaller, lighter, but powerful single board linux computer, Beagle Bone! We like this move to a more compact and integrated SBC. For example, there is onboard Ethernet and USB host, as well as a USB client interface (a FTDI chip for shell access). It even comes preloaded with Angstrom Linux on the 4 GB microSD card! Here are some tips and tricks to get your BeagleBone up and running.

Adafruit LED Backpacks

Control small LED matrices with ease

What's better than a single LED? Lots of LEDs! The matrices use a driver chip that does all the heavy lifting for you: They have a built in clock so they multiplex the display. They use constant-current drivers for ultra-bright, consistent color, 1/16 step display dimming, all via a simple I2C interface. Here is a detailed guide showing you how to solder, wire and control the display.

SMT Manufacturing

Our mods, hacks, tips and tricks for SMT manufacturing.

Here are a bunch of tutorials for manufacturing small to medium scale (10 - 10,000) piece surface mount electronics.

Adafruit INA219 Current Sensor Breakout

Measure high side voltage and DC current draw over I2C

The INA219B breakout board will solve all your power-monitoring problems. Instead of struggling with two multimeters, you can use this breakout to measure both the high side voltage and DC current draw over I2C with 1% precision.

Thermocouple

Lets use the Seebeck effect!

Thermocouples are best used for measuring temperatures that can go above 100 degC. This is a bare wires bead-probe which can measure air or surface temperatures. Most inexpensive thermocouples have a vinyl covering which can melt at around 200 degC, this one uses a fiberglass braid so it can be used in high temperature measurements such as heaters and ovens. This is a handy guide which covers thermocouple use including an Arduino library and example code.

USB SNES Gamepad

Make a USB gamepad with an accelerometer inside

This project tutorial will show you how you can convert a console game pad into a USB keyboard mouse for playing games on your PC. The USB game pad can be used with nearly any software, such as a MAME emulator, game, simulation software, or for custom user interfaces. We will also show you how to add an accelerometer to the gamepad for tilt based gaming.

Force Sensitive Resistor (FSR)

Thin sensor that detects physical pressure.

FSRs are sensors that allow you to detect physical pressure, squeezing and weight. They are simple to use and low cost. This guide will show you how to wire an FSR, connect it to your Arduino, and give you some project ideas.

Photocells

CdS Cells, Photoresistors, & Light Dependent Resistors (LDR)

Photocells are sensors that allow you to detect light. They are small, inexpensive, low-power, easy to use and don't wear out. For that reason they often appear in toys, gadgets and appliances. This guide will show you how they work, how to wire them, and give you some project ideas.

TMP36 Temperature Sensor

Reading temperatures to 0.1 degree precision!

An analog temperature sensor is pretty easy to explain, its a chip that tells you what the ambient temperature is. This guide will show you how an analog temperature sensor works, how to wire one up, and some project examples.

Bosch BMP085 Breakout Board

Barometric Pressure, Temperature, & Altitude Sensor

This precision sensor from Bosch is the best low-cost sensing solution for measuring barometric pressure and temperature. This is a detailed guide so you can understand the sensor in depth including how to properly calculate altitude based on sea-level barometric pressure.

Tilt Sensor

The simple way to detect orientation or inclination

Tilt sensors allow you to detect orientation or inclination. They are small, inexpensive, low-power and easy-to-use. If used properly, they will not wear out. Their simplicitiy makes them popular for toys, gadgets and appliances. This guide will show you how they work, show you how to wire them up, and give you some project ideas.

PIR Motion Sensor

Pyroelectric ("Passive") InfraRed Sensors

PIR sensors allow you to sense motion, almost always used to detect whether a human has moved in or out of the sensors range. They are small, inexpensive, low-power, easy to use and don't wear out. This guide will show you how they work, how to use them, and give you some project examples.

IR Sensor

Make remote controls and listeners

IR detectors are little microchips with a photocell that are tuned to listen to infrared light. They are almost always used for remote control detection - every TV and DVD player has one of these in the front to listen for the IR signal from the clicker. In this guide we will explain how IR sensors work, how to pull IR codes out of a remote control, and show you how to wire them up to a microcontroller.

Thermistor

Measure temperature using a resistor!

A thermistor is a thermal resistor - a resistor that changes its resistance with temperature. Technically, all resistors are thermistors - their resistance changes slightly with temperature - but the change is usually very very small and difficult to measure. Thermistors are made so that the resistance changes drastically with temperature so that it can be 100 ohms or more of change per degree! This guide will teach you how thermistors work, and how to wire them up and use them with your favorite microcontroller.

DHT11, DHT22 and AM2302 Sensors

Basic temperature & humidity sensors

This guide covers the low cost DHT temperature & humidity sensors. These sensors are very basic and slow, but are great for hobbyists who want to do some basic data logging. We'll cover the lower-cost DHT11 as well as the DHT22 and AM2302

TSL2561 Luminosity Sensor

Low power, digital luminosity (light) sensor

The TSL2561 luminosity sensor is an advanced digital light sensor, ideal for use in a wide range of light situations. Compared to low-cost CdS cells, this sensor is more precise, allowing for exact lux calculations and can be configured for different gain/timing ranges to detect light ranges from up to 0.1 - 40,000+ Lux on the fly. This guide will show you how this sensor works, and how to use it with your favorite microcontroller.

Adafruit Pi Cobbler Kit

Assemble your Adafruit Pi Cobbler Kit

Once soldered together, the cable plugs between the Pi computer and the Cobbler breakout. The Cobbler can plug into any solderless breadboard (or even a prototyping board like the PermaProto). The Cobbler PCB has all the pins labeled nicely so you can go forth and build circuits without keeping a pin-out printout at your desk. We think this will make it more fun to expand the Pi and build custom circuitry with it.

Adafruit Prototyping Pi Plate

Serve up your Pi projects on a Prototyping Pi Plate

Now that you've finally got your hands on a Raspberry Pi® , you're probably itching to make some fun embedded computer projects with it. What you need is an add on prototyping Pi Plate from Adafruit, which can snap onto the Pi PCB (and is removable later if you wish) and gives you all sorts of prototyping goodness to make building on top of the Pi super easy.

Cross Stitch

Stitches are like pixels

So you want to learn cross stitch! Cross stitch is the process of turning a grid of pixels into a stitched masterpiece with tiny Xs in colored floss.

Monochrome OLED Breakouts

Using our small mono-OLED displays

This is a quick tutorial for our 128x64 and 128x32 pixel monochrome OLED displays. These displays are small, only about 1" diameter, but very readable due to the high contrast of an OLED display. Each OLED display is made of 128x64 or 128x32 individual white OLEDs, each one is turned on or off by the controller chip. Because the display makes its own light, no backlight is required. This reduces the power required to run the OLED and is why the display has such high contrast; we really like this miniature display for its crispness!

Raspberry Pi E-mail Notifier Using LEDs

A basic project to control LEDs with a Pi.

by Michael Sklar

Raspberry Pi’s popularity makes things so easy that it is almost scary. I set forth on a simple starter project of having the Pi show me when new GMail messages arrive. After some searching it seems that lots of people are already talking about how to do this and there are some great examples. Michael over at MitchTech had the most ready to go code which I pilfered from. Adafruit's Cobbler Breakout Kit makes the bread board experience even easier with the clearly labeled pins for each of raspi’s GPIOs.

TRON Bag

Turn an old laptop bag into geek-chic

Tote your Thinkpad and port your Apple in style with our custom TRON-inspired laptop bag tutorial. With a little soldering and sewing skills you can have your own light up satchel, sure to impress geeky friends. So grab your sewing needle and soldering iron and follow along!

Electro-knit

Hacking the Brother KH-930e knitting machine

This tutorial covers how to talk to a computerized knitting machine. Once the interface cable is made, we can create cool custom patterns and load them from a computer!

Arduino Prototyping Mounting Plate

Securely hold your Arduino next to a breadboard

By popular demand! We now have the plates from the ARDX available separately. Acrylic plate is engraved and cut here at the Adafruit factory. There are mounting holes for your Arduino and a space that fits a half sized breadboard very nicely.

GPS Dog Collar

Track how far you've walked your dog!

Make sure your dog gets her daily exercise by tracking your walks with a GPS dog collar! Use Adafruit's Ultimate GPS breakout along with a 32u4 board and OLED display wrapped in a flower made of ribbon to get a head's up on your walking progress.

0.96" mini Color OLED

Mini color OLED displays

Our 0.96" color OLED displays are perfect when you need an ultra-small display with vivid, high-contrast 16-bit color. The visible portion of the OLED measures 0.96" diagonal and contains 96x64 RGB pixels, each one made of red, green and blue OLEDs. Each pixel can be set with 16-bits of resolution for a large range of colors. Because the display uses OLEDs, there is no backlight, and the contrast is very high (black is really black). We picked this display for its excellent color, this is the nicest mini OLED we could find. This guide will show you how to hook it up and use it with an Arduino.

Calipers

Precision measurements in your hand!

This tutorial is for the Mitutoyo digital calipers we carry in the Adafruit shop. They're the best calipers one can get and we're pleased to offer them. We've put together a basic usage guide here to help people get started.

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