There are many LED displays out there for the average hacker to use. They are all roughly similar in hardware, so often the differentiating features are in the software that backs them up. The newest revision of the Pixie Chroma is a smart, 2-digit, 5×7 display module that is easy to use but has extremely good software, making your projects easier to bring to life!
Lixie Labs have clearly put in a huge amount of work for this iteration. The two new headline features are Quad Mode (a way to drive batches of the displays in parallel for faster refresh) and Shortcodes (making displaying symbols or any character much simpler). I’m particularly interested in the Shortcodes; these function much like emojis do on chat platforms like Discord: you enter the name of a symbol surrounded by delimiters, and the software interprets it as a particular image. While the software has 240 Shortcodes built-in, they offer an awesome web-based editor for creating more.
Simply click the pixels to set the display you want, and then copy and paste the generated code into your project. No more graph paper and binary arithmetic! This allows the displays to be used for just about any application you can imagine.
Their documentation is excellent, and they currently support the ESP8266, ESP32, and Teensy 3.x. Support for the RP2040 and SAMD21 are planned. And the best part of all is this project is OSHWA-certified Open Hardware!
Check out their YouTube video to see just how smooth and gorgeous these displays are:
We are very excited to announce that Tindie seller Bobricius is one of the 10 finalists in the first round of the Hackaday Prize — Planet-Friendly Power! This round is all about getting and storing power locally, which is one way we can reduce our burden on the planet. Many of the projects in this round focused on typical ways of creating and storing energy — wind turbines, solar arrays, hydroelectric, etc. But Bobricius’ entry focuses on a much smaller scale.
His entry is the ArmaLamp, a small light source that uses a supercapacitor, photocells, and a very efficient boost converter to provide nighttime illumination. Because it uses a supercap, it can be charged and discharged an almost unlimited number of times. Typically secondary (rechargeable) battery cells would wear out over time and require replacement. Because it uses a supercap that doesn’t need to be replaced, the entire module could be potted, making it waterproof and very rugged. It’s interesting that the design uses photocells instead of typical solar panels. This is just as valid an approach and allows more flexibility in shape and size, though often at the cost of lower efficiency. But for such a low-power device, this is a great application for photocells!
We’d also like to congratulate the other 9 finalists from this round — you can check out the announcement detailing the finalists here! Keep an eye out for the next round — Reuse, Recycle, Revamp. It’s going on right now, so you still have time to enter your project! Entries must be submitted by June 12th, 2022, and the finalists from that round will be announced on June 27th! You’ve got a chance at winning the grand prize of $50,000! Check out the official Hackaday Prize page for all the details.
The need to remotely monitor and control electronics is rising constantly. With more solar power systems, battery installations, and other power generation/monitoring projects – a simple and robust way to monitor and control these installations is essential. This wonderfully built and well-thought out TCP/IP Voltmeter more or less does what it says on the tin; providing a TCP server that will output measurements from the galvanically isolated voltmeter inputs.
But that’s not all! In many situations where remote voltage monitoring is needed, there’s also a need to control equipment. For example, when a certain voltage threshold is met, a device needs to be turned on. Or if the voltage dips too low, something needs to be disconnected. This board also contains 3 relays that can switch loads of up to 10A at 125VAC or 30VDC, though to be safe I would treat those as absolute maximums and stay well below them. The relays can always be used to switch a larger contactor or solid-state relay if large loads need to be controlled.
Besides hosting a simple TCP server, data can also be sent and received using SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). The board contains an SNMPv2 agent and can also be configured to automatically send data to any endpoint that supports HTTP POST for datalogging.
The board is powered from 12V, and has an on-board Ethernet port. It would be very easy to use a PoE splitter to power the board and get data through a single cable, making installation and troubleshooting even simpler. The layout is well thought out, and it looks like a robust and easy to use solution for remote monitoring. Keep it in mind the next time you need to remotely monitor and control a project!
The 2022 OHS was on April 22, 2022. It was held online this year — though hopefully next year will be in person! The summit was a great success, and it was hugely informative and entertaining. The opening keynote by Ashley Jane Lewis was simply amazing. As a white man, I don’t feel it’s my place to try and summarize or repeat her message — I simply would like you to go see it and hear it for yourself. You can watch the keynote here:
The summit celebrated all the amazing contributions to Open Hardware over the last year, and as I mentioned in my previous post I was really looking forward to the Open Source Toys for Endangered Animals talk. And they didn’t disappoint! Not only did we get to see some adorable animals (including tapirs and ocelots and sun bears) but we also got to see how Open Hardware was helping to make a real impact on the quality of life of these endangered species. Valencia the tapir showed us that interesting open source hardware doesn’t have to be high-tech! Often low-tech solutions (like a pineapple on a string) can solve the problem (tapir needing stimulation). Not coincidentally, I now really want to visit their lab (Dinalab) in Panama! You can see their entire talk here. Check out some of their clientele in the image below.
As sponsors of the 2022 Summit, we at Tindie got to chat with a bunch of attendees at our virtual “table”. We talked about neat products that are Open Hardware Certified, such as the Mooltipass and the Vinduino (a past Hackaday Prize winner!) that are listed on Tindie. Our sister website Hackaday was there also, revealing info about this year’s upcoming Hackaday Prize. The first challenge Planet-Friendly Power is almost over, and on May 1st the second challenge Reuse, Recycle, Revamp starts. So get your sustainable ideas flowing, and create a project on Hackaday.io to enter the contest!
Sustainability was another key topic at the summit. One of the talks that I really enjoyed was Helen Little’s talk about recycling plastics into 3D printable pellets. She works for a company called re:3D making large-scale 3D printers. They are very interested in creating a sustainable process for reusable, 3D printable plastics. While there are already some filaments available made with recycled plastics, they want to be able to feed ground up plastic directly into a printer.
In order for this process to be practical and sustainable, the resulting plastic pellets have to have material properties that are consistent and strong enough to displace some of the brand-new materials from the market. In order to test the materials, they first dehydrate the recycled plastic, as most plastics are hydrophilic and will pull water from the air. Then using an open-source tool called ImageJ, the particles of the plastic are analyzed to check for grain size differences between different recycling processes. Then they create many prints, including standard additive test pieces like NIST’s Standard Test Artifact (public domain!) and a few other prints for testing various parameters like bed adhesion and extrusion rate (like the Moai above!). There is just so much detail to go into that I strongly recommend you just go watch her talk if you are interested!
The entire summit was a lot of fun. It was great to connect with a bunch of other hackers interested in all sorts of things! If you’re working on something and want to get it certified as Open Hardware, check out their website at https://www.oshwa.org/ and click on the Certification page. If you want to watch the entire summit or just certain talks, check out their YouTube channel where the individual talks have now been uploaded. You can also see the archive of the whole stream.
This development board for the ESP32 is one of the densest boards I’ve seen on the Tindie front page – the number of features packed into such a compact board is awesome! Beyond holding the ESP32-WROOM package and the CH340 to program and communicate with it, you also get a huge number of optional peripherals that can be added as needed.
Some of the attractive features for building IoT devices include the high-efficiency DC/DC converter that can accept from 5-9V to power the whole board; a real-time clock with coin cell battery backup; headers to accept a GSM module which allows remote communication when WiFi or Bluetooth aren’t available; positions to fit a 433MHz radio module for communication on the ISM band (in North America, it’s 902-928MHz); the list just goes on and on!
The board can optionally connect to a user interface board which can have a TFT display and push buttons fitted. At around 8x8cm, the board is small enough to fit just about anywhere you might want to put it!
Note that this product is just the PCBs — though the seller hints that fully populated boards might be available in the future, which would be a great option for getting a fully working ESP32 prototype platform up and running quickly!
The Open Hardware Summit happens every year in the spring, and this year is once again happening online on April 22, 2022. Every OHS is jam-packed with awesome talks; this year hackers working on everything from sustainability to pellet 3D printing to open source laptops will be filling the 8-hour event. This year, Tindie, Hackaday, and Supplyframe are all sponsoring the event, and will be running a virtual ‘booth’ on the OHS Discord server which we encourage you to check out during the summit! The booth will be discussing Tindie & Open Hardware, as well as details about this year’s Hackaday Prize.
There are so many fabulous talks this year, but a few to keep an eye on are Leon Anavi’s talk about using open source software to make open source hardware – Open Source Tools for Making Open Source Hardware runs from 11:50 to 12:10. Another Tindie friend, Alex Glow, will be talking about A Better Hardware Life Cycle: Build Stuff Without Feeling Like a Jerk from 10:40 to 11:00. This talk is all about sustainability in open hardware; how to choose materials, design, produce and repair in an Eco-friendly and sustainable way.
Another talk that shouldn’t be missed is Andy Quitmeyer’s Open Source Toys for Endangered Animals! I mean, we get to look at cute animals playing with open source hardware to help keep them stimulated, healthy, and happy! What’s not to love? This talk is at 15:20 and runs until 15:40.
Tickets are still available! The goodie bag has some really cool stuff in it this year, including some very awesome artwork by Dushan Milic. Buying a ticket helps support OSHWA and the costs of running OHS. If you are unable to afford a ticket due to financial difficulty, don’t worry – you can watch the livestream for free!
EMG, or electromyography, is a method for detecting, recording and analyzing the electrical activity of skeletal muscles. An electromyograph detects the potential energy generated by muscles when they are activated either by the brain or by external electrical fields. It has a wide variety of uses; helping to diagnose neuromuscular diseases or other disorders of motor control.
EMG is split into two methods — needle EMG and surface EMG. Needle EMG uses electrodes that are inserted directly into the muscle, producing much higher accuracy and is typically used in medical settings where accuracy is extremely important. Surface EMG uses electrodes stuck to the skin, which can help test muscle functionality and can also be used to control prosthetic limbs.
The Muscle BioAmp Shield is a device designed for surface EMG, used to analyze and record muscle movements. With this shield, you can take human-machine interaction to the next level! This device could enable new accessibility tools for computer users. It can also be used in physical therapy settings, to help people undergoing rehabilitation detect when they are activating the correct muscles.
EMG devices are typically quite expensive, as they are medical grade diagnostic devices. But with a simple Arduino shield like this, you can be conducting EMG experiments and collecting data for a fraction of the cost of a professional EMG machine. Note that results depend on your placement of the electrodes. It’s important to understand the musculoskeletal layout of the body in order to place the electrodes in the correct spot to measure a particular muscle.
This shield could be a great tool for science teachers covering biology. Show your students how their brains control their muscles by sending electrical signals that they can see with their own eyes! You’ll need an Arduino of some sort, as well as a 9V battery. The shield comes with 15 stick-on electrodes, but it’s very easy to buy more online. Remember that electrodes should only ever be used once, and discarded afterward – treat them like sterile medical products!
I was given a BBC Micro:bit as a gift a while back, and I found it really fun to play with! Even though my experience level is way above the group they are marketing it towards, it’s still a really well-designed and powerful development board. The only downside was that the GPIO were broken out only to a card edge connector, and no expansion board came with the device.
Well, thankfully this awesome little board from SB Components provides exactly what you need to take full advantage of the huge number of GPIO the Micro:bit has. It also breaks out a few extra pins in the same format as the original board itself — large pads with a banana plug hole in them for quick testing and prototyping.
If you’re thinking about getting a Micro:bit for a young hacker, then definitely pick up one of these breakout boards to go along with it. It significantly increases the range of projects one can undertake! If you want something that plugs directly into a breadboard, they also offer a version that plugs directly into a standard breadboard for quick prototyping and learning how to build simple circuits.
This is a must-have accessory, and thankfully it’s compatible with both v1 and v2 of the Micro:bit, which is good news for me as I was early on the bandwagon and my v1 can now fully flex its electronic muscles!
We’ve all done it — you flash your device, and suddenly it stops communicating. Scratching your head, you realize — oops! You set the reset pin as GPIO! Now the code running on the device is locked in — or is it? Thankfully, AVR designers foresaw this horrendous tragedy and included an override mechanism: high-voltage programming. This nifty little tool from Canadian designermicroprogrammers can recover the newer generations of ATtiny devices using the new AVR 1 cores.
AVR devices have supported high-voltage programming (called HVPP in AVR parlance) for a long time. When the new AVR 1-based devices were released, they used a different programming interface than the traditional AVRISP, the new UPDI interface. However, they retained the high-voltage fail safe (thankfully for us hackers in a rush). Instead of the entire programming process being done with 12V on the reset pin like the old AVRs, a 12V pulse on the reset line forces the device into UPDI mode and allows normal programming. This tool then resets all the fuses to their default values, allowing your normal programmer to function again!
A tool like this is extremely useful to have on hand. From the research I’ve done, it looks like the MPLAB Snap does not support 12v programming, but the PICKIT4 does. So, a Snap plus this tool can make a very useful, affordable development toolkit. Make sure to check out the rest of their store — they also make devices to unbrick the older AVR cores, as well as UPDI programmers and more!
It’s finally happened – the computers are cloning themselves! In only 7 seconds, a new Arduino is born, and a hacker is armed with another tool! Is this the end of the world… or a new beginning? Well, it might not be the singularity, but this automatic Optiboot replication machine is an absolute must-have tool for those working with Arduino, especially outside of a standard Arduino board.
Just like the original Arduino Uno, insert an ATMEGA328p into the ZIF socket, provide power, press the button and… voilá! Another Arduino is born. It can then be programmed from the Arduino IDE using any USB-to-serial cable, or inserted into any of the Arduino boards that accept through-hole ATMEGA328p.
We’ve all accidentally borked our bootloaders, or wiped the chip to use with Atmel Studio and then later needed to reflash the bootloader. This usually requires two Arduinos, or an Arduino and an Atmel programmer of some kind. But this cuts out the middleman, so to speak, and would be a great tool to have on hand at a hackerspace.
Because it uses a zero insertion force socket and is self-contained (only requiring USB power), it also is super useful for small production runs that use Arduino and Optiboot. Pop the chips in one at a time, and then pop them into a socket on the final board. Programming the firmware can then easily be done over USB or serial. The creator, UniversalSolder, use two of these programmers to create about 5000 Arduino chips a year! Now that’s a tried and tested tool!
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