Ground Control is delighted to announce that the world famous IoT specialist Adafruit has become a US reseller of a RockBLOCK bundle. The bundle, which consists of the RockBLOCK 9603 unit with FTDI cable, is now available through the Adafruit website.
Adafruit
Founded in 2005 by MIT hacker and engineer, Limor ‘Ladyada’ Fried, the 100% female-owned Adafruit is an open-source hardware designer, manufacturer, reseller, and online store for tools, equipment, and electronics. They also record and distribute weekly show-and-tell programs for product launches, as well as their long-running Ask an Engineer videos.
With a wealth of brains and passion behind them, Adafruit has become #11 in the top 20 USA manufacturing companies. It’s also noted as one of the fastest-growing private companies in NYC by Inc. 5000, with over 100 employees and a 50,000+ sq ft. factory.
Alongside over 5,000 products, the RockBLOCK 9603 is now taking pride of place on the Adafruit shelves.
RockBLOCK 9603
The RockBLOCK 9603 is the compact little sibling of our RockBLOCK 9602 Mk2. With a clear view of the sky, the board allows users to transmit their project data from machine to machine, anywhere in the world. The RockBLOCK has been used for countless projects, from small-scale experiments to university geological research, like Slide Sentinel, through to offshore telemetry for issues such as renewable energy. (See our work with Ocean Scientific International Ltd to this end here.)
The RockBLOCK is now available from the Adafruit website. Adafruit Industries Founder and CEO, Limor Fried, introduced their latest product offerings herself, including the RockBLOCK, on Adafruit’s YouTube channel last week (see here). Subscribers showed their excitement at the RockBLOCK with comments including:
“Omg the satellite texting blows my mind right now :)” ~ PewDiepie
“The satellite modem is very interesting, I need to investigate this further” ~ Christopher Guy
And simply “Very interesting” ~ David Adams.
In the video, Fried said: “You can send messages anywhere in the world, which is amazing. The price per message is not that expensive as long as you’re putting your data together in the right way. I love it, it’s really small. A great way for any developer, scientist, student, or engineer to start using satellite communication.”
To help customers get started with the RockBLOCK bundle, Adafruit also kindly put together a RockBLOCK 9603 with USB Cable – Iridium Satellite Modem Bundle + Accessory Cable.
Ground Control Solutions Architect, Elonda Wallace, said: “Adafruit are a big player in the IoT reseller market. As part of Ground Control’s new sales and marketing strategy, we’re looking to expand our reseller presence across the world so Adafruit was an obvious choice. We’re delighted that they are now selling RockBLOCKS.”