Mini Maker Faire Orlando Report: Electronics

In my previous post about the Mini Maker Faire Orlando, I described some of the cool hardware that was on display.  In this post, I’m going to describe some of the electronics available from local vendors.

Electrimod

Electrimod MiniStack

Electrimod MiniStack

Local vendor Electrimod (Clermont, FL) was on hand to showcase their pluggable modules for PIC microcontroller development.  Basically, Electrimod is developing products that are equivalent to Arduino shields.  You start with the PIC module, and then plug in whatever other modules you need to build your prototype in the form of a stack. These brand-new products aren’t available yet, but they should be shipping by June or July 2012.

Gabotronics

Xprotolab on a breadboard

Xprotolab

 Gabotronics is a small business located near Bradenton, FL that produces miniature instruments that combine the functionality of an oscilloscope, function generator, logic analyzer and calculator.  The product on display at the Faire was the Xprotolab, a tiny little single-board instrument as shown in the picture on the left.  This picture just doesn’t do justice to the bright, crisp display.

This is a really cool little module, but I can’t figure out what I’d use it for.  It’s too small to use as a benchtop oscilloscope.  With an analog bandwidth of 200kHz and 2Msample/sec sampling, it would be suitable to embed in an audio rack.  Gabotronics says it can be used as a development board for the AVR XMEGA microcontroller, which might be its main application.

Jaycon Systems

Jaycon Systems is our local Arduino distributor, based on the Space Coast.  They actually sell a wide range of electronic components in addition to Arduinos, such as ARM-based microcontrollers, motor drivers and sensor modules.