New Products Announcements - 09/13/2020

TPS62173 Acorn

TPS62237 Acorn

Mega Sapling Dev Board

CP Sapling Dev Board

Coming over the next few weeks and months to Oak Development Technologies are a few exciting and versatile products to help you get started on your project. Here are a few that are coming by in the next 2 weeks.

Power Acorns

Just like acorns, power is the seed that brings life to your projects. To help bring life to your projects, ODT is releasing two new voltage step down or buck converters to our power acorns line up. These acorns will come in two varieties which provide the typical voltages you'd expect when working with hobby and DIY projects.

The first is the TPS62237 Acorn which allows you to pass in typical voltages you would get from USB power (5V to 6V) and break that voltage into a nice positive 3.3V output while maintaining the 500mA current output you expect. These little acorns will provide your project with 1.65W (watts) of power.

The second is the TPS72173 Acorn which is another buck converter that takes a wider range of voltages, up to 17V and break it down into 5V. This breakout is great for situations where you need 5V and up to 500mA of dedicated supply. Ideas for this include powering short RGB LED strips like the NeoPixels sold by Adafruit, or a wide variety of other 5V sensors, LEDs, and more.

Both of these buck modules will be available for order on September 21st, 2020 through these two links:
- TPS62237 Acorn
- TPS62173 Acorn

The First Sapling Microcontrollers

Microcontrollers are a great starting place for learning how to code and build DIY and cosplay projects. To help out, ODT is bring two special Sapling boards to our site in 2020, with a potential 3rd as well.

The Atmel ATMega328p is one of the most iconic microcontrollers on the market due to its embrace of the maker market, and being a popular microcontroller in Arduino development boards. It was an obvious choice for our first ever Sapling board, the Mega Sapling. 

Sapling boards are special in that these are microcontroller boards featuring well known and supported microcontrollers which feature 12 header pins or less on the board. The reason for this is to simplify the design process, and also make it easier to get started with our development boards.

Each sapling will have i2c and SPI pins broken out, as well as a handful of GPIO to general connectivity. 

The Mega Sapling will be available to order the September 30th, with the Mega Sapling + Qwiic (Sparkfun Qwiic connector) coming January 2021.

In addition to the Mega Sapling, we are also bringing the beloved SAMD21E to a Sapling form factor. The SAMD21E is a favorite of the CircuitPython community due to it's small footprint and lots of support across both Arduino and CircuitPython.

Similar to the Mega Sapling, the CP Sapling as we are calling it, will feature i2c, and SPI connectivity as well as a Sparkfun qwiic connector to quickly integrate i2c products with STEMMA QT and Qwiic connectors.

The CP Sapling will be coming to our site around Black Friday along with a special discount code for those who sign up to our newsletter.


That's all we have for this new product spotlight. As always, make sure to sign up for our news letter so this come right to your inbox, as well as great tutorials and videos coming to the ODT Blog!

-Seth Kerr
​Founder ODT