You may have noticed that we run out of stock of panStamps yesterday. This is something we wanted to avoid but this week has been a crazy one. panStamp is rapidly gaining popularity since we opened the web store three months ago and now we need to adapt our production rhythm to the actual demand. Small hardware manufacturers, software start-ups, software developers, integrators and enthusiasts mostly make up our young community. panStamp has proven to fit very diverse applications, where low power wireless communications is required. By the way, this is the reason why we took some extra weeks before launching our next production.

OK, it's time to talk about next panStamps. New units will include a 32.768 Khz crystal, a small one measuring 3.2 x 1.5 mm. Boards will be the same since the PCB footprint was already there but the crystal will be added to the board from now on. This crystal brings some nice features:

Current panStamps rely on the watchdog timer to take the module out of the sleep state after a given interval. However, the addition of the new crystal lets us disable the watchdog timer, reducing around 5 uA the current consumption of the Atmega328p MCU. Thus, new panStamps improve consumption and time precision.

Finally, new panStamps will include the popular Optiboot bootloader. Optiboot requires only 512 bytes whilst the current bootloader requires 2KB. Some extra space for applications!