Adafruit’s Top Ten Best Selling Products of 2018 #AdafruitTopTen
by Angelica
Happy 2019! To celebrate another year in the books, here are our top 10 best selling Adafruit products from 2019!
10. ADAFRUIT TRINKET M0 – FOR USE WITH CIRCUITPYTHON & ARDUINO IDE
The Adafruit Trinket M0 may be small, but do not be fooled by its size! It’s a tiny microcontroller board, built around the Atmel ATSAMD21, a little chip with a lot of power. We wanted to design a microcontroller board that was small enough to fit into any project, and low cost enough to use without hesitation. Perfect for when you don’t want to give up your expensive dev-board and you aren’t willing to take apart the project you worked so hard to design. It’s our lowest-cost CircuitPython programmable board!
9. POWERBOOST 1000 CHARGER – RECHARGEABLE 5V LIPO USB BOOST @ 1A – 1000C
PowerBoost 1000C is the perfect power supply for your portable project! With a built-in load-sharing battery charger circuit, you’ll be able to keep your power-hungry project running even while recharging the battery! This little DC/DC boost converter module can be powered by any 3.7V LiIon/LiPoly battery, and convert the battery output to 5.2V DC for running your 5V projects.
8. ADAFRUIT FEATHER HUZZAH WITH ESP8266 WIFI
This is our take on an ‘all-in-one’ ESP8266 WiFi development board with built in USB and battery charging. Its an ESP8266 WiFi module with all the extras you need, ready to rock!
At the Feather HUZZAH’s heart is an ESP8266 WiFi microcontroller clocked at 80 MHz and at 3.3V logic. This microcontroller contains a Tensilica chip core as well as a full WiFi stack. You can program the microcontroller using the Arduino IDE for an easy-to-run Internet of Things core. We wired up a high-quality SiLabs CP2104 USB-Serial chip that can upload code at a blistering 921600 baud for fast development time. It also has auto-reset so no noodling with pins and reset button pressings. The CP2104 has better driver support than the CH340 and can do very high speeds without stability issues.
7. ADAFRUIT GEMMA M0 – MINIATURE WEARABLE ELECTRONIC PLATFORM
The Adafruit Gemma M0 is a super small microcontroller board, with just enough built-in to create many simple projects. It may look small and cute: round, about the size of a quarter, with friendly alligator-clip sew pads. But do not be fooled! The Gemma M0 is incredibly powerful! We’ve taken the same form factor we used for the original ATtiny85-based Gemma and gave it an upgrade. The Gemma M0 has swapped out the lightweight ATtiny85 for a ATSAMD21E18 powerhouse.
6. ADAFRUIT MOTOR/STEPPER/SERVO SHIELD FOR ARDUINO V2 KIT – V2.3
The original Adafruit Motorshield kit is one of our most beloved kits, which is why we decided to make something even better. We have upgraded the shield kit to make the bestest, easiest way to drive DC and Stepper motors. This shield will make quick work of your next robotics project! We kept the ability to drive up to 4 DC motors or 2 stepper motors, but added many improvements:
Instead of a L293D darlington driver, we now have the TB6612 MOSFET drivers with 1.2A per channel current capability (you can draw up to 3A peak for approx 20ms at a time). It also has much lower voltage drops across the motor so you get more torque out of your batteries, and there are built-in flyback diodes as well.
Instead of using a latch and the Arduino’s PWM pins, we have a fully-dedicated PWM driver chip onboard. This chip handles all the motor and speed controls over I2C. Only two data pins (SDA & SCL in addition to the power pins GND & 5V) are required to drive the multiple motors, and since it’s I2C you can also connect any other I2C devices or shields to the same pins. This also makes it drop-in compatible with any Arduino, such as the Uno, Due, Leonardo and Mega R3.
5. ADAFRUIT 9-DOF ABSOLUTE ORIENTATION IMU FUSION BREAKOUT – BNO055
If you’ve ever ordered and wire up a 9-DOF sensor, chances are you’ve also realized the challenge of turning the sensor data from an accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer into actual “3D space orientation”! Orientation is a hard problem to solve. The sensor fusion algorithms (the secret sauce that blends accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope data into stable three-axis orientation output) can be mind-numbingly difficult to get right and implement on low cost real time systems.
Bosch is the first company to get this right by taking a MEMS accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope and putting them on a single die with a high speed ARM Cortex-M0 based processor to digest all the sensor data, abstract the sensor fusion and real time requirements away, and spit out data you can use in quaternions, Euler angles or vectors.
Rather than spending weeks or months fiddling with algorithms of varying accuracy and complexity, you can have meaningful sensor data in minutes thanks to the BNO055 – a smart 9-DOF sensor that does the sensor fusion all on its own! You can read the data right over I2C and Bob’s yer uncle.
If you didn’t think that the Raspberry Pi Zero could possibly get any better, then boy do we have a pleasant surprise for you! The new Raspberry Pi Zero W offers all the benefits of the Pi Zero v1.3, but with one big difference – built-in WiFi!
More specifically, this giant upgrade is the addition of a BCM43143 WiFi chip BUILT-IN to your Raspberry Pi Zero – just like the Pi 3! No more pesky WiFi adapters – this Pi is WiFi ready. There’s also Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) on board making the Pi an excellent IoT solution (BLE support is still in the works, software-wise).
We also have a basic pack, budget pack and starter pack with all the essentials to get your Zero W up and running.
3. RASPBERRY PI 3 – MODEL B+ – 1.4GHz CORTEX-A53 WITH 1GB RAM
The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is the most popular Raspberry Pi computer made, and the Pi Foundation knows you can always make a good thing better! And what could make the Pi 3 better? How about a faster processor, 5 GHz WiFi, and updated Ethernet chip with PoE capability? Good guess – that’s exactly what they did!
The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is one of the latest products in the Raspberry Pi 3 range, boasting an updated 64-bit quad core processor running at 1.4GHz with built-in metal heatsink, dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless LAN, faster (300 mbps) Ethernet, and PoE capability via a separate PoE HAT.
2. ADAFRUIT ULTIMATE GPS BREAKOUT – 66 CHANNEL WITH 10 Hz UPDATES – V3
We carry a few different GPS modules here in the Adafruit shop, but none that satisfied our every desire – that’s why we designed this little GPS breakout board. We believe this is the Ultimate GPS module, so we named it that. It’s got everything you want and more:
- -165 dBm sensitivity, 10 Hz updates, 66 channels
- 5V friendly design and only 20mA current draw
- Breadboard friendly + two mounting holes
- RTC battery-compatible
- Built-in datalogging
- PPS output on fix
- Internal patch antenna + u.FL connector for external active antenna
- Fix status LED
- New! Version 3 comes with the latest module which has external antenna support and Pulse-Per-Second output
- …all for under $40!
Circuit Playground Express is the next step towards a perfect introduction to electronics and programming. We’ve taken the original Circuit Playground Classic and made it even better! Not only did we pack even more sensors in, we also made it even easier to program.
Start your journey with Microsoft MakeCode block-based or Javascript programming. Then, you can use the same board to try CircuitPython, with the Python interpreter running right on the Express. As you progress, you can advance to using Arduino IDE, which has full support of all the hardware down to the low level, so you can make powerful projects. You can even use code.org CS Discoveries to learn all about coding right in your browser!
Because you can program the same board in 3 different ways – the Express has great value and re-usability. From beginners to experts, Circuit Playground Express has something for everyone.
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