We have a new office. It’s brand spanking new, and very shiny. You can now find us at 250 York Road, London, SW11 5SJ.

For folk who live in London, unlike the old office, we’re happy to allow customer collections of orders placed online. Please remember that you need to arrange this with us first, and you can’t just turn up without letting us know. We’re thrilled to be expanding enough to need a new office, and that’s all thanks to you guys and your loyal support over the years. We’re confident that our new HQ will mean faster, more reliable order dispatch, and happier customers all round. Huzzah!

First, from everyone at Cool Components, we wish all of our customers and suppliers a very happy new year. Thank you for your business and support in ‘09. 2010’s shaping up to be a brilliant year, with lots of exciting stuff happening. More to be revealed soon. In the mean time, a big shout out to the guys at Parrot ARDrone. They’ve launched a very cool augmented reality helicopter game system. Not quite sure what we mean? Have a look at this :

The ARDrone is really just a collection of the technologies we sell here at Cool Components, and is really an inspiration that amazing things can be done with just a few microprocessors, accelerometers and a wifi link or two.

The project is open source with an SDK available, so the applications (entertainment based and otherwise) for this are limited only by your imagination and computer graphics prowess, oh… and whether you can fly a helicopter with your iPhone!

As things gear up for Christmas, we’re stocking a range of exciting new products. First up is a fantastic Arduino shield.

The GPRS ‘Playground’ slots over your Duemilanove, and gives it the power to send voice or data via the world’s cellular phone networks. Email, web, twitter, ftp, SMS – what ever you want to send or receive really. Onboard features include a microphone, reset switch, and SIM card holder.

This powerline modem allows data to be sent or received over your home/office mains cable. With speeds of up to 5Mbs, this is a great solution for when LAN cables and WiFi can’t cover the distance (or get through the walls!)

The powerline range includes handy ‘daughter’ modules that fit onto the modem’s expansion port. Ethernet, usb and Xbee are all supported. Happy days!

Serial LCD displays are all the rage, but this one is a little different. Small, light and easy to use, the TextStar even has four on-board buttons. If you need to show a bargraph display, this display makes it very easy. For RC fans, there’s a ready made servo diagnostic mode.

This cable has to win the prize for the most useful thing ever. It’s a USB-serial converter, with all the gubbins built in to the USB plug housing. Signals are both 5 and 3.3 V tolerant, and the breakout connector at the TTL end also provides a handy 5V supply. Don’t leave home without one!

The LPC-1766-Stk is a powerful development board for the excellent LPC1766 ARM processor from NXP. It has an onboard 128×128 x12bit colour TFT display, a 3-axis digital accelerometer with 11 bit accuracy, a temperature sensor, USB device and host connectors, a joystick and much more.

Finally, if you need your project to know exactly what time it is, you’ll need a real time clock module. We’ve programmed these with the precise GMT (Zulu) time, and they can be easily interrogated via I2C from an Arduino or other suitable platform. A battery means the time is never lost (until the battery runs out)

We’re thrilled to announce that we’re now an official reseller for Roving Networks. They’re a cracker of a company from the US who make several fantastically exciting wireless products. The first we’re featuring opens the world of WiFi up to anyone who’s able to send a serial command, and allows your projects to talk to the world via the internet.

The WiFly GSX module is a complete ultra low power embedded TCP/IP solution – a stand alone, embedded wireless 802.11b/g networking module. The combination of ultra low power and the ability to wake up, connect to a wireless network, send data and return to sleep mode in less than 100 milliseconds, allows the WiFly GSX to run for years (yes years!!!) on two standard AAA batteries.

Another principal product from RN is the RN-41 bluetooth module.

Designed to replace serial cables this module totally encapsulates the troublesome Bluetooth stack®. The end user just sees serial characters being transmitted back and forth. Press the ‘A’ character from a terminal program on your computer and an ‘A’ will be pushed out the TX pin of the Bluetooth® module. With over air data rates of 721kbps to 2.0Mbps and support for most of the popular profiles this module really opens up the world of bluetooth.

Also now in stock – have you ever tried to use a cheap bluetooth dongle with your PC, but been plagued by badly written drivers, or pairing problems? These two roving network dongles add Bluetooth functionality to legacy laptops of PCs, but without the myriad of bugs and problems that seem to affect lesser, poorer quality products. We especially like the DIP swtches on each device that allow the pairing ID to be set via hardware!