Ladies and gentlemen, it is with deep regret that I present you with our last news post of August. Next week will become September, which causes uncontrollable weeping for students, parents of students, and anyone who was ever a student. Lots of pain all around. Heck, some of the Calgary trees are already starting to go moldy/change colours. After summer, we get approximately twelve days of fall before we are plunged into a perpetual state of cold and snow for the next eight months. Sigh. Oh well, enough complaining. Onto the show.

This week’s Cool Thing comes courtesy of Matt, who made a slick-lookin’ Pummer Flower, based off of our BEP Pummer schematics and using an SCC3733 cell. We could explain it… But instead we’ll leave it to the man himself to give you the details in the video below. He’s currently working on an Instructables project for it, so keep your eyes open for it soon.

• Heat Shrink Kit – Yay… Heat shrink! Never worry about connection breakage again! Use it to reinforce connections, protect devices, and electrically isolate exposed solder joints. A variety of colors are included to color code your signals or just to make things look pretty!
• Force Sensitive Resistor – Square – These sensors are simple to set up and great for sensing pressure, but they aren’t incredibly accurate. Use them to sense if it’s being squeezed, but you may not want to use it as a scale.
• LED Cube 3x3x3 – This is a kit for a 3x3x3 cube of RGB LEDs. You can create a colour cube show with this kit, it actually look quite impressive, especially at night! You could always attach one of these suckers to your alarm clock and blast yourself awake with a multi-coloured spectacle!
• USB Host Shield – Contains all of the digital logic and analog circuitry necessary to implement a full-speed USB peripheral/host controller with your Arduino. This means you could use your Arduino to interface with and control any USB slave device – thumbdrives, digital cameras, bluetooth dongles, game controllers, Android phones and much more!
• MP3 Player Shield – This new revision of the MP3 player shield retains the awesome MP3 decoding abilities of the last version but adds the storage functionality of the SD card shield.
• Humidity Sensor – HIH-4030 Breakout – This SparkFun breakout board houses the Honeywell’s HIH-4030 humidity sensor. The HIH-4030 measures relative humidity (%RH) and delivers it as an analog output voltage.

And that’s all we gots for you this fine Friday evening. Go forth and enjoy the fine summer weather while it lasts, folks.