The Adafruit Electret Microphone AGC Amplifiers feature a built-in microphone and use the MAX9814 microphone amplifier. The amplifier's automatic gain control will reduce loud sounds and amplify the quiet ones to minimise volume related distortion. You can configure the maximum gain to 40, 50 or 60dB and the Attack/Release ratio to 1:4000, 1:2000 or 1:500 via jumper settings.

The amplifier's output is approximately 2Vpp with a 1.25V DC bias making it suitable for sampling with a 3.3V analogue to digital converter (ADC) without the need for a blocking capacitor. However, if you want to connect one to a Line Input then use a blocking capacitor of between 1 and 100µF unless you have a differential amplifier or it already has its own blocking capacitor.

Get started quickly using Adafruit's tutorial for this board showing how to wire one up to a set of headphones. Having mastered that, you can move on to connecting one to a microcontroller. Adafruit have a tutorial and FFT library for the Arduino which extracts frequency information from the audio and another which is a sound level tutorial.

Supplied with a fully assembled amplifier board, and a strip of 0.1in. header pins for you to solder on if required.

• Electret mic with AGV amplifier
• Selectable gain 40, 50, 60dB
• Dimensions 26 x 14mm (1 x 0.6in.)
• Adafruit part no.: 1713

*Customers looking to resell on eBay or Amazon should contact Adafruit directly.

The Adafruit 2.8in. TFT LCD Touchscreen Display brings QVGA graphics to your next project using only 5 x SPI pins or 12 x GPIO pins if you can spare them. The screen is bright with a 4-LED backlight and can display 18-bits of colour (262,000 colours). There's a display controller built in so your microcontroller doesn't need to get involved in refreshing the screen, it just has to write the pixels once then it can move on to other tasks. SPI mode uses less pins but is slower while 8-bit mode uses more pins and is faster, the choice is up to you. Adafruit have software and tutorials to support you whichever mode you decide to use, see the links below. The board also has a micro-SD card socket that you can use to store files and images.

Imagine what you could do with this if only it had a touch screen. Of course you don't need to imagine, because the display has a built-in resistive touch screen. Because it uses resistance to detect touch, this screen will work with a finger, a stylus, the non-writing end of a pen or even a gloved finger. Anything that can put pressure on the screen will register a touch. The touch screen uses a further 2 x digital pins and 2 x analogue inputs regardless of whether you use SPI or 8-bit mode to drive the display.

Supplied as a fully assembled and tested display with a strip of 0.1in. header pins for you to solder on as required. Visit https://learn.adafruit.com where Adafruit provide a free tutorial for the Raspberry Pi, and another tutorial for the Arduino. They also have an open source library to drive the display in 8-bit mode, and another to use SPI mode. Please note that while the screen is capable of 18-bit colour, the Adafruit code uses 16-bits for efficiency. It's highly unlikely that you'll ever notice any difference.

• 2.8in. diagonal touchscreen TFT LCD
• 240 x 320 resolution, 18-bit colour
• Use in SPI mode or 8-bit mode
• Micro-SD socket
• 3.3 to 5V compatible
• 3.3V LDO regulator on board
• Adafruit part no.: 1770

*Customers looking to resell on eBay or Amazon should contact Adafruit directly.

The Adafruit 16x9 Charlieplexed PWM LED Matrix Drivers are pin compatible with the Adafruit Charlieplexed LED Matrix boards. This neat combo lets you drive 144 x 0603 individually addressable surface mount LEDs using just 2 x I2C signals (CLK and DAT). And because the boards support 8-bit PWM, each LED can be dimmed, which is rare for single colour LED matrix boards and allows a whole range of interesting animated effects. Adafruit have a free tutorial that also shows you how to download their driver software which is compatible with their ADAFRUIT_GFX graphics library. You'll be drawing lines, circles, text and small bitmaps in no time and with minimal effort.

The core chip is the IS31FL3731 which handles all the switching and PWM for you. It also has 8 x frame buffers you can write to and then switch between to create even more animation effects. Each board can be set to 1 of 4 I2C addresses so that 4 x boards can share a single bus for a total of 576 addressable, dimmable LEDs. They're compatible with both 3 and 5V logic to suit whatever microcontroller you prefer for your project.

• LED Matrix driver
• Individually dimmable LEDs using 8-bit PWM
• 8-frame memory for animations
• 3 and 5V logic compatible
• Dimensions 2.4 x 43.3 x 27.8mm (1.7 x 1.1 x 0.09in.)
• Adafruit part no.: 2946

*Customers looking to resell on eBay or Amazon should contact Adafruit directly.

The Adafruit Monochrome 128 x 64 I2C OLED Graphic Displays give any microcontroller main board a 128 x 64 monochrome OLED display. All this takes just the 2 x I2C signals plus 2 x power lines. The OLED displays have individual LED pixels which generate their own light so there's no backlight and very high contrast. Even though the displays are only small they're very clear and crisp.

Adafruit supply a free tutorial and an Arduino library to get you started. Supplied as a fully assembled and tested display board plus strips of 0.1in. pitch pin headers for you to solder on as required. Please use a microcontroller with at least 1Kbytes of memory as the display has to be buffered.

• 128 x 64 pixel display
• I2C interface
• 3.3 to 5V logic and power compatible
• Dimensions: 38 x 29mm (1.5 x 1in.)
• Adafruit part no.: 326

*Customers looking to resell on eBay or Amazon should contact Adafruit directly.

These Adafruit Red 4-Digit 7-Segment Displays take the pain out of using 7-segment displays by including an I2C backpack to do the constant current driving and multiplexing. Connecting displays like this can be quite expensive in precious GPIO pins, but with the added backpack they only use the 2 x I2C signals plus 2 x power connections. They are great for microcontrollers with limited outputs such as the Adafruit Trinkets which only have 5 x IO pins. They're also handy for grown up boards like the Raspberry Pi which have better things to do with their time than multiplex LEDs. Applications such as a voltmeter (please be careful), temperature gauge or clock suddenly become much simpler.

Each board has address selection jumpers allowing you to have 8 x of these displays attached to a single I2C bus. There are I2C commands to write to all four digits, just one digit, adjust the brightness, etc. As you would expect Adafruit have also published a free library and a tutorial to get you off to a quick start. Supplied with a 4-way strip of header pins for you to solder on as required for your project.

• Add a 4-digit 7-segment display to your project using only 2 x I2C lines
• Built-in constant current drivers and multiplexers
• 15 levels of brightness control for the ultra-bright LED segments
• Suitable for 3.3 and 5V power supplies
• Backpack dimensions: 27 x 50 x 4mm (1.1 x 2 x 0.16in.)
• 7-Segment display dimensions: 19 x 50 x 14mm (0.75 x 2 x 0.56in.)
• Adafruit part no.: 878

Please note that some soldering is required to mount the display on the backpack board, a total of 14-pins. You may also want to solder on the supplied 4-pin header or wire directly to the board.

Alternatively, we supply Adafruit 8x8 matrix displays which also have I2C backpacks, great for jewellery, animated displays etc..

*Customers looking to resell on eBay or Amazon should contact Adafruit directly.

*Customers looking to resell on eBay or Amazon should contact Adafruit directly.

The Adafruit Stereo 3.7W Class D Audio Amplifier features AGC (Automatic Gain Control) and up to 89% efficiency making it ideal for battery powered projects. Optional onboard jumper pins (supplied) let you control the gain quickly and easily though it can be controlled by signals from off the board. There's also a shutdown pin for each channel. 1.0µF capacitors on the input channels make them fully differential, the R- and L- pins can be tied to ground if you don't have differential inputs. The amplifier is intended to drive speakers directly as it outputs 360kHz PWM which the speaker coils average out. That may seem like an odd idea, but the high frequencies cannot be heard. The outputs are Bridge Tied for direct connection to the speakers.

Supplied as a fully assembled board, including the 1.0µF capacitors plus 2 x 2-pin screw terminal blocks for the speaker connections and a strips of 0.1in. male header pins for you to solder as needed.

• 2 x 3.7W into 3Ω 10% THD
• Thermal shutdown, short circuit and over-current protection
• Power supply 2.7 to 5.5V DC
• Based around the MAX98306 amplifier
• Adafruit part no.: 987

Please see our range of speakers or breadboards if you need them, as they are not supplied.

*Customers looking to resell on eBay or Amazon should contact Adafruit directly.