This tiny puck is so jam-packed with features, a bullet point list is the only way to give you a rundown or else we will quite literally be here all day. A Kickstarter campaign is currently underway and at the time of writing it has reached nearly five times its goal of £20,000. There’s only three days left to back the project if you want to get your hands on one as soon as possible! It’s from Gordon Williams, a Tindie seller with some excellent hardware in his store. We can’t wait to see the puck there someday too.
In this tiny puck you get:
- Bluetooth Low Energy version 5.0 which gives 80M range in open space.
- You can write Javascript code in a browser and have it update on the device in real-time. No special software is required. Imagine how much easier this will make debugging!
- It’s got a boat load of sensors — light, temperature, magnetism, capacitance, and a tactile switch that turns the puck itself into a button.
- Still not satisfied with the amount of sensors? There are 6 GPIOs broken out to 0.1″ pins. This also gives you access to a 12 bit ADC, SPI, I2C and UART.
- You can control the puck from a browser or from an app on your phone. Pair this with the 6 GPIO pins and you could make a robot or any of about a million other things.
- The puck can be configured as a slave if you want to control it externally or alternatively it can act as a master. In master mode it can appear as a Bluetooth HID device meaning it can act as a keyboard or a mouse without having to install drivers on your PC.
- The puck runs Espruino, a JavaScript interpreter for micro-controllers. Espruino has TCP/IP and HTTP magic built-in so you can connect your puck to the Internet via Bluetooth.
- It’s all open source. You can check out the latest design revisions over on GitHub.
That’s the quick and dirty rundown of what this ingenious little puck has to offer. For a complete list of its features and example applications, check out the Kickstarter campaign linked at the top. The video is particularly interesting as it shows some really interesting things you can do with it. If you miss out on the Kickstarter campaign, you’ll see this puck on Tindie once all of the backers have received their pucks but why wait that long?
