Adafruit VL6180X Time of Flight Distance Sensor (VL6180)

Adafruit: The expert for open source hardware

For more than ten years, programmers and tinkerers have benefited from the expertise of the Adafruit brand. Whether for beginners or proven experts, Adafruit has the right hardware components ready for your next IoT project.

Light comes into the dark with Adafruit NeoPixel

One extremely popular product line from the company's broad portfolio is Adafruit NeoPixel. These nifty LED components come in a wide variety of designs and color temperatures. NeoPixel modules are available, for example, in the form of a practical stick with five intelligent LEDs in red, green and blue (RGB) or in white (W), as a shield with 40 eye-saving RGBW LEDs in which all pixels are individually addressable, and as a jewel with seven RGBW LEDs that can be controlled with 8-bit PWM per channel.

Especially popular is the Adafruit NeoPixel Ring with 16 ultra-bright, intelligent RGB LEDs including integrated drivers, which you only need a single microcontroller to control. The trick is that the Adafruit NeoPixel rings form a chain, so to speak: You couple the output pin of one with the input pin of the other.

With the Adafruit NeoPixel products you can realize a wide variety of projects - there are virtually no limits to your creativity. With the help of an Arduino, a jumper cable and the appropriate software, you can control a NeoPixel ring individually and light up the small LEDs as you wish - either individually or in a specific combination. This way, you can also create your own Vu meter with the versatile LED components. Practical: To make programming Adafruit NeoPixel easier, Adafruit provides an Arduino library as well as a Python library.

Adafruit Feather Boards: Powerful hardware in a compact format

With Adafruit Feather, the hardware specialist from the States also has various powerful development boards in its range, which are essentially equivalent to an Arduino in terms of function. All of these boards are equipped with similar features; among other things, the pin assignment is the same and there are also many parallels when it comes to the microcontrollers and the battery charging properties. In addition, you can also find Feather boards with special devices like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular network connectivity as well as boards with microSD slot in Adafruit's product range. The name "Feather" is no coincidence: The boards are also characterized by being particularly compact and, above all, lightweight.

The range of top-class product highlights is wide: The STM32F405 Feather, for example, is the fastest CircuitPython board from Adafruit with an outstanding 168 MHz and meets the highest demands. It is equipped with a STEMMA QT / Qwiic port at the end, which makes it easy to connect to I2C sensors. The Adafruit Feather nRF52840 Express, on the other hand, shines with Bluetooth Low Energy and can also be used with CircuitPython thanks to native USB support.

Another important part of Adafruit's portfolio are the FeatherWings. With these expansion modules, you can also include components such as a display or a motor driver in your IoT project. The FeatherWing Proto is a proven classic in Adafruit's portfolio. This is ideally suited as a prototyping add-on for all Feather boards. The Adafruit FeatherWing Wing Tripler Mini Kit, on the other hand, is ideal if you want to connect a Feather to two other FeatherWings at the same time.

With the Adafruit MIDI FeatherWing Kit you get a music capable FeatherWing, thanks to which you can equip your Feather with MIDI input and output jacks. And with the Adafruit FeatherWing OLED you can easily add a small OLED display to your Feather board - no soldering required.

Adafruit: What's behind the brand

As an expert in open-source hardware, Adafruit has long since established itself in the electronics industry. The company was founded in 2005 by Limor Fried. At the time, the talented and innovative electrical engineer was still a student at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). To this day, Fried is CEO of the electronics giant, which is now headquartered in New York. The company's name also goes back to its founder: Fried was once known on the World Wide Web by the nickname "Ladyada" - a tribute to the famous IT pioneer Ada Lovelace.

Adafruit says it is committed to getting more people excited about technology and science - and thanks to its first-class products, the hardware expert from the USA is sure to succeed!