What’s new in China? New maker products roundup May 2017
Here are new maker products recently released which are worth looking at:
“Wifi board not based on ESP8266”
ElectronicFans has a new RTL8710 wifi board. At slightly over US$7, it isn’t the cheapest board, but it seems fairly complete. The RTL8710 boasts a 166Mhz ARM Cortex M3 and is a such a serious competitor to the beloved but ageing ESP8266.
9 DOF breakout board
At ModuleFans, we get a nice 9 DOF “Degrees of Freedom” breakout board, made with a LSM303DLHC accelerometer and a L3GD20 gyroscope. It’s an all in one motion sensor board and communicates with I2C and SPI protocols. Nice.
Arduino MP3 Shield
Still at ModuleFans and probably a bit more niche, we get a MP3 module based on the VS1053B chip. The VS1053B can decode MP3, OGG, AAC, AAC, WMA and Midi files. It comes with a SD Card reader in which you can store the files, and the whole thing is held together with the MP3 Shield library from Sparkfun.
DS3231 real time clock
YourCee has a new RTC module based on the DS3231 chip. This RTC chip is considered to be the most reliable of the DSxxx clocks out there, since it provides its own internal oscillator. As a result, the risk of having calibration issues is greatly reduced. You can query it over I2C and it comes with a battery backup. I have one of these myself and I can attest of their better quality.
Finally, Feiyang Electronics has 64×48 OLED screen that runs on I2C. Not much else documentation is available so you’d better hope it behaves like a typical I2C LCD.
Links:
ElectronicFans store page: https://www.aliexpress.com/store/1414081
ModuleFans store page: https://www.aliexpress.com/store/612195
YourCee store page https://www.aliexpress.com/store/1089303
Feiyang Electronics store page: https://www.aliexpress.com/store/1022067
