As you might have noticed from some of our recent blog announcements, we are steadily working on expanding our selection of hobby servos, and the latest example is Power HD’s new giant-scale (also called 1/4-scale) 1235MG servo. When compared to the popular, standard-size high-torque 1501MG servo, it is easy to see why this is called a “giant” servo:

What you get for the increased size is increased power — a huge 560 oz-in (40 kg-cm) of torque at 7.4 V or 490 oz-in (35 kg-cm) at 6 V. Previously, if you needed more torque than our high-performance standard-size servos could deliver, our only options were the Torxis monster servos; now, the 1235MG servo helps fill that power gap.

For more information, see the 1235MG servo product page.

We have included this servo in our Black Friday sale (along with the rest of our Power HD servos) for 25% off, but the sale ends tonight at midnight (PST), so you need to hurry if you want to get it at the sale price!

Related products

Power HD Ultra-High-Torque, High-Voltage Digital Giant Servo HD-1235MG

While our laser cutting machines can only cut two dimensional parts, there are easy ways to make three-dimensional designs out of flat, laser-cut parts. A simple way to achieve this is to create slots in the vector design to allow the two parts to slide together perpendicular to one another. Some may remember this technique from childhood arts and crafts; this easy tweak allows parts to be easily assembled and disassembled.

These Chandeliers by Nicole Ketchum were created using our 3 mm acrylic with a slot width of 1/8″. You can adjust the width of the slot depending on how snug you’d like them to fit. Since Nicole’s chandeliers are meant to be hung out of reach, a really snug fit wasn’t needed. With the holidays right around the corner, these could spruce up any room of your home!

For more details on using slots to fit acrylic parts together, be sure to check out Nicole’s project in our Custom Laser Cutting Gallery. More details about our custom laser cutting service can be found here.

Related products

Custom Laser Cutting Service

We just got a bunch of these in, so we are making them a late addition to our Black Friday sale for just $6.95 (50% off), no coupon required: Sharp GP2Y0A21YK0F Analog Distance Sensor 10-80cm.

Pololu shipping department on Black Friday (November 29) 2013.

Our Black Friday sale is in full swing and it is a little crazy around here. If not for the lack of snow and elves, one might be excused for mistaking our manufacturing and shipping departments for Santa’s high-tech workshop, with motor drivers fresh from the oven and that new-Zumo smell wafting through the air. Thanks to their tireless efforts, our stock levels are so far holding strong, and orders are making it out at a record pace. If you have already placed an order, thank you! If you are still trying to decide if you want to take advantage of our amazing deals, don’t wait too long—the sale ends Monday night.

In related Black Friday news, Pololu distributor Banana Robotics is having a Black Friday – Cyber Monday sale with some great deals!

And fellow purveyor of cool electronics stuff, Adafruit, is having their biggest sale ever today, with free stuff plus 10% off:

We are now carrying three high-performance servos from Power HD that offer an excellent combination of strength and speed for their size.

Power HD Low-Profile Digital Servo 1207TG – This servo is very fast and strong, despite being much shorter than a standard-size servo, making it great for applications with tight space constraints.

Power HD Digital Servo 8312TG – Much stronger than the 1207TG while nearly as fast, this servo is great for applications that require both high speed and high torque. All of the gears are made of titanium-shielded aluminum.

Power HD High-Torque, High-Voltage Digital Servo 1218TH – With a whopping 290 oz*in (21 kg*cm) of torque, this is our strongest standard-size servo, and unlike most hobby servos, it has an operating voltage range of 6 V to 7.4 V. Like the 8312TG, this servo has gears made of titanium-shielded aluminum.

All three of these servos feature coreless motors, all-metal gears, and digital control electronics, and all of them support pulse frequencies up to 333 Hz. For our full selection of Power HD servos (which are on sale right now for Black Friday for 25% off!), see our servo category.

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.