Happy New Year!!

From us at AsyncLabs to you and yours, we hope that everybody had a great holiday and that the new year is off to a good and successful start.

Now that the new year is upon us, we thought it was about time to uncover a small bit of new stuff we've been working on. We do have a couple of other things that are in the works, but we don't want to blow the lid off those projects yet. Note that these pictures won't match up exactly to what the final production part will be. Good thing for cost-effective prototyping to fix flaws and change things to the way we want!

BlackWidow

The first new piece of hardware we'd like to introduce is the BlackWidow. Just as sinister as the real deal, without all the killing. And when the WiFi light is on, it does have that singular, distinct red "spot" on it's back to let you know that it's all business.

Following the Duemilanove form-factor, this solution has everything you'd expect from both the WiShield and Duemilanove, with a couple of twists. A switch replaces the jumper selection for the WiFi interrupt. A 5-pin mini-USB B connector. A 2-pin JST power connector, which can connect to battery connectors as well as a JST to 2.1mm DC barrel jack connector. And yes, it'll have populated headers for the connectors that aren't shown on the prototype picture.

YellowJacket

This is the part that we are really excited about because we see so much potential in it. This is basically a Arduino mini with WiFi (dimensions are approximately 2"x1.5"). You'll need a USB breakout board (a 90 degree male pin header will come out the top on the production part) to do programming with, but once programmed, it should fit into some pretty small places. One example project I'd definitely like to tackle with this is to convert Ladyada's Tweet-a-Watt from ZigBee to WiFi. This board is definitely small enough to fit in the Kill-a-Watt case. While the prototype is blue, we have asked for yellow PCBs to go along with the name. Life is definitely more interesting with a bit of color.

Software

Well new hardware is great, but it's only so useful as the software. We know that the software isn't brain-dead easy to use, and it's something we are trying to fix. We're currently reworking a lot of the stack and driver code to be a bit more modular, and easier to use. This reworking of the code is currently driving us bonkers. Most of this is due to the deficiencies in the ATMEGA328. We hope to have this out soon, and hopefully this will enable us to put in some new features that a lot of people have asked for (do I hear DHCP anyone)? Along with this we'll try our best to man the forums and provide more documentation to help everybody along.

Other random stuff

A lot of people ask me about a drop-in Mega shield. The Mega is something on our radar, and we'll probably roll a WiShield like equivalent first, and then a BlackWidow equivalent later. Doing a Mega WiFi shield is far easier than a Mega+WiFi, so we hope to get something out there for all the Mega users as soon as we can. Another question we get is about external antennas. We're working with our vendors to get good pricing on the antennas, and we hope to have more external options for our products later this year. And lastly, yes, I know that our website and the store interface suck. Really. Really. Bad. It irks me everyday as an administrator. It WILL be changing, and it should be for the better (actually, I'm not sure if it can get worse honestly).

So this is what AsyncLabs has coming down the pipe (at least the stuff that I can talk about now ). Sorry, no ETA on availability since they are all at different phases, with parts flying all over the world. But do stay tuned...