Our Black Friday sale is back, and this one is our biggest yet. We are discounting hundreds of products by 30% to 60% and offering an additional 11% to 15% off orders over $100. The sale coupons and price changes become active in just over 6 hours. We hope these deals give all you robotics and electronics enthusiasts out there a happy start to the holiday season! For coupon codes and sale information see our Black Friday Sale 2013 page.

Our Zumo Robot is a great platform for getting into robotics with your Arduino. The Zumo was designed with Mini Sumo competitions in mind, but that’s not the only thing you can do with it. This video gives an overview of the Zumo’s features and some ideas on what you can do to make it your own.

Pololu forum user Camel recently posted the Quaternion-based AHRS using AltIMU-10 & Arduino. This is an Arduino program that can read data from our AltIMU-10 sensor board, compute the orientation of the board, and output it over serial. It uses quaternions internally to represent the rotation, but can output Euler anglers, a rotation matrix, or a quaternion. The MinIMU-9 v2 is just an AltIMU-10 without a pressure sensor, so the code can be made to work with a MinIMU-9 v2 by commenting out a few lines.

The AHRS program is part of the Firetail UAV System, an open source UAV autopilot system that is currently under development. You can follow the the project’s progress on its blog.

As smartphones and tablets become more popular and more advanced, they drive the rapid development of progressively better and cheaper inertial sensors, and we’ve come to expect a new 3D compass/accelerometer chip from ST every year or so. We’re catching up again with their latest technology (for the time being) with the release of our LSM303D 3D compass and accelerometer carrier.

The LSM303D offers a number of improvements over its predecessors, including a wider maximum magnetic sensing range (up to ±12 gauss). It also features a more unified I²C interface and adds support for SPI communication. Our carrier board includes a 3.3 V voltage regulator and level shifters that make it easy to use with 5 V systems. For more information, see the product page.

We’ve also lowered the price on our previous generations of compass/accelerometer carriers: the LSM303DLHC carrier is now $11.95, and the LSM303DLM carrier is only $9.95.

We are now carrying the Raspberry Pi Model B, Revision 2.0!

In case you haven’t heard of the Raspberry Pi, it is a popular credit card-sized computer that can run Linux. It was designed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in order to provide an affordable platform for experimentation and education in computer programming. The Raspberry Pi can be used for many of the things that a normal desktop PC does, including word-processing, spreadsheets, high-definition video, games, and programming. With its 0.1″-spaced GPIO header and small size, the Raspberry Pi also works as a programmable controller in a wide variety of robotics and electronics applications. We have seen a lot of our customers do neat things with the Raspberry Pi, and we have featured several of those projects on this blog.

Related past posts featuring the Raspberry Pi:

• Digital Capabilities: a digital garden
• Controlling a Maestro in C using a Raspberry Pi
• Dagu Rover 5 controlled by a Raspberry Pi
• PiBBOT
• Raspberry Pi Telepresence Rover
• Raspberry Pi-based State Poster Project
• Raspberry Pi – Real Time Control via Android HTML5
• Pi-Trak
• Using a Maestro to control a quadcopter
• PiBot-B: mobile robot with a Raspberry Pi
• Wireless Servo Widget

For more information on the Raspberry Pi, see the product page.

Our 75:1 HP micro metal gearmotor is now available with an extended motor shaft that works with our recently released optical quadrature encoders. If there are other gear ratios that you would like to see available with extended motor shafts, we would love to hear about it.

For more information on this gearmotor, see the product page. For other options, you can take a look at our full selection of micro metal gearmotors.

When properly modified for continuous rotation, hobby RC servos become an inexpensive, compact, easy-to-use actuator system for robotics projects, and servo manufacturers are increasingly answering the growing demand for such products with servos designed specifically for robots. One example is Power HD’s new AR-3606HB continuous rotation servo, which offers open-loop speed control rather than the closed-loop position control you typically get with a servo. It is the fastest and strongest continuous rotation servo we carry (up to 71 RPM and 93 oz*in of torque), with performance well suited for driving a small robot.

For more information on the AR-3606HB, see the product page. For other options, you can check out our full selection of continuous rotation servos or our entire RC servo category.

Related post: Understanding continuous-rotation servos and multi-turn servos

The United States Postal Service is closed today in observance of Veterans Day. Pololu will be in operation and will ship orders via FedEx as usual. Orders scheduled for shipping via USPS on Monday will be shipped tomorrow.

USB Mini-B connector breakout board with included optional header pins.

USB Micro-B connector breakout board (older usb04b version) with included optional header pins.

These basic boards conveniently break out the VBUS, GND, D-, D+ and ID pins of USB Mini-B and Micro-B connectors to a set of five 0.1″-spaced pins, making it easy to power your project from a USB port or to add a USB connector to your breadboarded USB microcontroller. The compact USB Mini-B Connector Breakout Board measures 0.55" × 0.85", while the even smaller USB Micro-B Connector Breakout Board measures 0.44" × 0.5" (including the USB connectors).

We are now carrying female 0.1" headers with right-angle pins, in sizes from 1×2 to 1×12. You can view these and other female header products on the category page.