Tindie

The Raspberry Pi is an excellent little Linux box which can easily be attached to an UPS (uninterruptible power supply) by just adding a USB power bank. But without properly shutting a Pi down, your SD card will be corrupted, and the incredible pocket-sized server becomes a pain to fix. The PiZ-UpTime PLUS is the solution to power supply problems in the Raspberry Pi.

Like any UPS, it keeps a Pi chugging along if the main power goes out. The trick with the PiZ-UpTime PLUS is initiating a soft shutdown once the power fails, giving time to clean everything up. Once power is restored this UPS waits for it to stabilize before starting up the Pi. Bingo!

The PiZ-UpTime Plus uses a standard Lithium Ion or Lithium Polymer battery, either an 18650 soldered to some leads or a 1-cell LiPo pouch cell you probably already have sitting around in your junk drawer. Connection to a Pi is through the 40-pin header, and it works on almost any Raspberry Pi, ranging from the Zero model to the newest version 4.

The seller GP Consulting Inc. / Alchemy Power Inc. is based in California and has a plethora of exciting Raspberry Pi accessories for you to check out!

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A while back, the Raspberry Pi Foundation released a new version of their microcontroller-based board, the Raspberry Pi Pico. The Pi Pico W features the same powerful RP2040 microcontroller found in all Pi Zeros, but adds WiFi and Bluetooth with the addition of a small co-processor. It’s a winning combo for any microcontroller enthusiast by any measure.

Invector Labs took this idea, ran with it, and came up with a similar board that offers the capabilities, but in a format that’s a bit more familiar to the hardware enthusiast. The Challenger RP2040 WiFi/BLE uses the same main chip as the Pi Pico, but adds an ESP32-C3FN4 for WiFI and BLE capabilities. It’s also compatible with the Adafruit Feather format and includes a 1-cell LiPo battery charger, with everything charging over a USB-C connector.

There’s a lot of weight behind the Feather ecosystem, and if you’re looking for a microcontroller board that can be easily powered by battery, you really can’t find anything better. The code is great, too, with Micropython support, a UF2 bootloader in ROM, and documentation abounds.

On the wireless side of things, the Challenger RP2040 WiFi/BE includes a RISC-V microcontroller and 2.4GHz radio with a AT interpreter providing low-level TCP/UDP functionality, web server, MQTT server, and other client functions. All of this is accessible by the RP2040 over a high-speed UART or SPI channel.

If you want to get into microcontroller work, the RP2040 is a great place to start, and the Challenger RP2040 WiFi/BLE offers a lot of functionality for a very low price.

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Building your own CNC router isn’t exactly hard. For at least a decade now, enterprising makers have been firing up their 3D printers, cutting electrical conduit, soldering stepper motor drivers, and making their own CNC routers. One problem with a lot of these builds is the ability to adjust the speed of the off-the-shelf router which is used as the router part of a CNC router. The GRBL_SPD is a Makita Router Integration Board used to control the power and speed of the ‘standard’ Makita 701C router via GRBL.

By connecting the GRBL_SPD to an ordinary Arduino, any CNC router can have software control over the router’s RPM (from 10,000 to 30,000) and the on/off states. This means you won’t have to adjust the stock speed dial on the router while it’s moving around on the CNC. This is also the safer way to do speed adjustments on a homemade CNC because you can adjust the speed on a computer instead of dangling fleshy bits over a spinning router.

The GRBL_SPD comes with the required circuit board and a 10A relay, but it does require you to attach the router to the board with five wires, and additional wiring for the manual control box. It’s not difficult, but since every homebrew CNC router is different, there’s a bit of engineering and planning you’ll have to do so the GRBL_SPD can be completely integrated into your electronics setup.

Check out the video below for a full demonstration of what the GRBL_SPD can do.

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A water softener is a fairly common piece of equipment found in many homes. Fill it with a bunch of salt, and all those calcium ions will be replaced with sodium ions. Your soap lathers now, and you might just get rid of those deposits on your coffee pot.

While a bag of salt may last a month or so in a water softener, you can’t know what you don’t measure. That’s what led Erik Lemcke to create the Salt Sentry, an IoT gizmo to monitor the level of salt in a water softener.

For measurement, the Salt Sentry uses a Time-of-Flight laser-ranging sensor to measure the distance from the water softener to the salt block. It’s a simple solution, and more than accurate to tell you if you’ll need to fill up the water softener in the next week or so.

The brain of the Salt Sentry is an Espressif ESP-WROOM-02, incorporating an ESP8266 microprocessor in a small package. This module sets up a web server that’s accessible over WiFi, and has support for MQTT, so your home assistant of choice will tell you when to buy more salt. You can check out an example of what the web interface looks like in the panel to the left.

Because the ESP8266 is well-supported by the Arduino IDE, the Salt Sentry is also fully hackable, with six GPIO pins broken out onto an internal header. If you want to expand the Salt Sentry to provide more measurement, go for it. Add a light sensor, so you know when the basement light is on. There’s already a really, really awesome manual for the Salt Sentry available and a bit more information available on how to connect it to your network.

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Floppy disks were once the data storage medium of choice. All software came on floppies, as CD-ROM drives cost as much as a car, and you weren’t cool unless you had at least two floppy drives in your computer. Those days are long gone, but there’s now a way to connect any floppy drive to a modern PC. It’s the Greaseweazle, a USB to floppy adapter distributed by Tindie Seller Emmy Bear Holdings.

The Greaseweazle is an interface board that treats an old floppy drive as a USB drive – genius! This includes PC and Mac disks (including 400k and 800k disks), Apple II, Amiga, weird CP/M disks, and even old PDP-11 disks in an 8″ drive. It does this by reading the magnetic flux on the disk, then that data is converted and read by a number of programs.

While the Greaseweazle is just hardware, there are a few software tools to read disks. The official Greaseweazle Host Tools will get you started, and FluxEngine is also supported by the Greaseweazle hardware.

If you’ve got a pile of floppies sitting around in storage and are looking for a way to bring that data to new hardware, it’s hard to go wrong with a Greaseweazle. Just add a floppy drive, a floppy drive ribbon cable, and you’re on your way to reading all those old floppies.

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If you ever get the chance, or have the means, I highly recommend you take a look at some everyday objects under an electron microscope. Put a grasshopper in a SEM, and you’ll see something that looks incredibly like what you would find in a human anatomy book, except the bones are on the outside in the case of a grasshopper. Take a look at some cool MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes under a SEM, and you’ll find a world of simple machines — levers and wedges — machined out of microscopic pieces of metal.

Kenny Brown is a researcher with access to a scanning electron microscope and recently had the idea of making a few stands for SEM stubs for preparation or storage. Yes, it’s just a platform for the little platforms used to hold the sample, but at five dollars for a five-pack it’s probably the cheapest and most useful device you’ll find in a research lab.

These single SEM stub stands (say that five times fast) are made with a soy-based photopolymer resin. They’re a great way to store a stub on a shelf or in a drawer, and much more handsome than plopping a stub into a bit of foam. Keep in mind these stub holders are not conductive, so they’ll need to be sputter coated if they’re to be used in a scanning electron microscope.

You can check out a few pics and videos of this stub stand over on Kenny Brown’s Instagram. It’s not the usual sort of thing he puts on his Tindie store, but there is apparently a shortage of small, attractive stub holders on the market, and he thought he’d give this a go. Good work.

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Photography is a science and an art. Not only do photographers need to have a good grasp on optics and chemistry (if they’re shooting film), but also physics. You can’t do physics if you can’t measure something, and that’s where this calibrated light source from Tindie seller Film Camera Tester comes in. This tool is how you calibrate light meters, either hand held or built into cameras). If your light meter isn’t calibrated, you’ll get over or under exposure, possibly ruining your shot.

The idea behind this calibrated light source is to be part of a larger kit meant for testing camera shutter and exposure settings. The Film Camera Tester is an Arduino-based kit meant to perform a variety of time-based tests and calibrations of film cameras. This includes testing the timings of shutters, the delay between flash contact and the shutter opening, and taking a series of measurements and calculating the average stats of a film camera.

The calibrated light source can be used with this Film Camera Tester to calibrate light meters, and is adjustable within 4-16EV, with a calibration accuracy of 5%.

Like vinyl records and CRT displays, what’s old is new again, and that includes film cameras. Sometimes digital just won’t do, and there are an increasing number of photographers shooting only on film. If you’ve got a film camera, odds are it’s more than a few decades old, and that means calibration is key. This calibrated light source, along with the film camera tester, gives you the tools to make sure your camera is working in tip-top shape.

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Although they’ve been around for decades, resin printers first reached consumers as experimental devices cobbled together from seemingly random bits and bobs. A few years ago, cheap desktop machines appeared on the market, and now more and more hackers and makers have a resin printer sitting on a (hopefully) well-ventilated desk.

With commercial, ready-made resin printers, there’s a bunch of hackers and makers working to make those printers even better. The UV Blaster 30 Kit is one of those hacks, upgrading the Elegoo Saturn resin 3D printer for much faster prints. Like most low-cost resin printers, the Saturn printer works by shining UV light through an LCD to render each layer of a print in resin. By increasing the amount of UV light, layer times go down and print speeds go up.

This kit replaces the existing UV LEDs inside the Elegoo Saturn with almost 100 Watts of UV LEDs, a significant upgrade over the stock 45 Watts of UV power. While this does require an upgrade to the power supply, there’s a really, really good guide for upgrading this printer. If LEDs in machine tools are your thing, the SMDKing storefront has a few really neat upgrades for a few popular drill presses and mills. They’ll shed light on a lot of subjects and make your next project a lot easier.

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This Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) is just about the smallest one we’ve ever seen. With an accelerometer and gyroscope operating at up to 6.7 kHz and a Time-of-Flight sensor, the Tracer from elektroThing will give you the orientation of anything you strap it to, streaming signals back to your phone.

The idea behind the Tracer is to stick an IMU on any object to trace its pose and motion. This can mean anything from taking a mountain bike off a sweet jump, the motion of a tennis racket or golf club when taking a swing, or simply just strapping it to a glove for a new-Power Glove for the metaversal revolution.

To do accomplish all of this, the Tracer uses an IMU capable of measuring acceleration at ±4/4/6/16 g at 1.6 Hz to 6.7 kHz, and measuring position with a gyroscope at ±125/250/500/1000/2000 DPS at 12.5 Hz to 6.7 kHz. Also on board is a Time-of-Flight sensor that is able to measure absolute distances up to 2m.

But sensors alone do not a tracker make, and for talking to the outside world the Tracer uses an ESP32-PICO-D4 to provide WiFi and Bluetooth. All of this is powered by a coin cell battery and should be good for a few hours of runtime. More than enough to get the readings you need, at least.

Of course, the Tracer is programmable with Micropython and Arduino, and fully supports Phyphox to stream IMU readings directly to your phone.

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For years, the holy grail of portable communication devices has been mesh networking. Instead of using high power transmitters and long antennas like amateur radio, or base stations like the common cell phone, mesh networking promises a huge coverage area with small, cheap transmitters. The only caveat is that there are enough devices to actually create a mesh network.

Currently, LoRA technology is the best way to get to where we want, and the Meshtastic from B&Q Consulting Shop in Shenzhen is an excellent solution to creating a useful mesh network! Inside the Meshtastic is a Semtech SX1276 LoRA transceiver, alongside an ESP32 WROOM module and a GPS module. By connecting the credit card-sized Meshtastic module to your smartphone, you can send data over an improvised mesh network over LoRA. Think of the Meshtastic as a LoRA modem for mesh networks, using your phone and an app as the actual interface.

More information about Meshtastic can be found with the documentation, alongside the hackaday.io project page, and firmware and schematics. There is a really incredible writeup on the use and capabilities of the Meshtastic on their blog, showing how even in urban environments a low-bandwidth network can be made without any other infrastructure.

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