Lots of exciting new products now online. First up, one of the most gorgeously presented development tools we’ve seen for a long time.

Embedded Artist’s LPXPresso Baseboard comes in a lovely metal tin, and looks a bit like there should be cake inside. Instead of cake – a highly featured base board designed to accept either the NXP processor based MBED (we’re stocking this soon fingers crossed) or one of the native LPC Embedded Artists target boards.

The baseboard has tons of features including an onboard RGB-LED, a 5-key joystick switch, a rotary switch with quadrature encoding, a speaker and a 96×64 pixel white OLED. Full specs are here.

From Sparkfun the new sensor 9 degrees of freedom motion sensor board features. If you’re interested in autonomous vehicles, this board has the ability for AHRS. This makes the board a powerful platform for UAV control, autonomous vehicles, and image stabilization. The board uses three axis of gyro, accelerometer, and magneto along with a direction cosine matrix (in software) to obtain a stable heading reference in almost all environments. Wowser!

Also from Sparkfun a more humble, but no less useful offering. The TMP102 is a simple digital temperature sensor with 0.0625°C resolution, I2C interface, and all accurate to 0.5°C. A doddle to use along with an Arduino or any other I2C enabled MCU.

Finally – a new breed of Ultrasonic range sensors from our chums at Maxbotix. The XL-MaxSonar-EZ0 sensor features 1cm resolution and continuous recalibration to counter the effects of changing temperature, humidity and voltage. With a measurable range from 20cm to 765cm this sensor will no doubt find a large amount of applications.

We have a new office. It’s brand spanking new, and very shiny. You can now find us at 250 York Road, London, SW11 3SJ.

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)