August 28, 2006

Dangerous place -- Spark Fun Electronics

Jen -- hold my Credit Cards for a few weeks will 'ya? Just found this place: Spark Fun Electronics One of the problems with 'do it yourself' electronics these days is that many of the really cool new chips are only available from the manufacturer in huge quantities -- thousands or more. The other is that since these chips were designed to be used in small electronic devices that are assembled by robot, they are tiny -- very very tiny and it is incredibly difficult for a human to attach wires and solder them to a circuit board. Spark Fun Electronics has solved both of these problems by selling single quantities of these chips already mounted onto a small circuit board. This board is "human scale" and has provisions for cables to be attached. Spark Fun Electronics also sells tools, software, single-board computers and sensors for robotics. Reasonable pricing too. Here is an example:
cell-phone-camera.jpg
This is one of the newer Cell Phone Camera modules mounted onto the circuit board.The dots around the edge (Y0, Y1, Y2, etc...) are on their circuit board and are the places where you can solder your connections. The tan wrinkled thing between the two black objects is the factory installed cable from the circuit board to the camera. Camera is the black thing on the left. Want one? $30 and it's yours. Not bad for a color video camera that measures 1" by 0.8" Posted by DaveH at August 28, 2006 3:45 PM | TrackBack
Comments

That rocks.

Check the http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=7841 (USB-to-parallel) widget for $14.95. That's the cheapest I've seen anywhere. The 'LabJack' is $99, and is very similar.

Posted by: Al at August 30, 2006 8:32 PM
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