Tindie

In February 2017, the world of music shifted on its axis with the launch of “Lofi beats to relax/study to” stream on YouTube. Lofi Girl shepherded us into the warm embrace of Lo-fi hip-hop, and we’re all the better for it. If you miss those early days of the genre, the nostalgia of the everpresent Lofi Girl during those late-night study sessions, you should check out the SnapBeat Lo-Fi sampler.

The sampler is straightforward in its design, featuring 8 channels controlled with keyboard switches, each channel capable of about 6 seconds of high-quality sampling or 12 seconds of low-quality, if crunchy sounds are more your style. A Nuvoton ISD1720SY voice recorder IC drives each channel, and the whole sampler is able to hold 8 rhythm patterns, each 2 bars long. An Arduino Nano is the brains of the entire thing, meaning you can also upload your own firmware should you want to customize it. The entire kit comes preassembled, ready to rock right out of the box. You’ll need a few commonly available cables to get started, like a USB-C for power, and a standard 3.5mm stereo cable if you want to connect to an external sound source for sampling purposes.

The SnapBeat is a project of love from Hiro Akihabara, based out of Hanoi, Vietnam. As a lover of hip-hop and DIY music, Hiro draws inspiration from the music he loves and wants to create, but every sampler out there is a complicated mess of confusing interfaces.

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Okay, I’m not gonna lie. The first thing I thought when I saw the Jumperlux was “RGB backlit breadboard? That’s excessive and I love it.” I’m easy to please like that, just throw some addressable RGB LEDs and I’m sold. But the Jumperlux is so much more than just an RGB breadboard since it comes with a protoboard and SMD breakout boards, all inter-connected for quick and easy prototyping.

What is so unique about this PCB breakout is that the breadboard, protoboard, and universal SMD breakout are all connected, allowing for shared connections between each row. The silkscreen is also a nice touch, clearly marking the extra data and power connections. If you just want to use each breakout individually though, you can snap each section off. The breadboard has the option to add 80 addressable RGB LEDs, all controllable with any microcontroller and the ever-faithful Adafruit Neopixel library. The SMD breakout supports a broad range of chips of a variety of different pitches and footprints, offering so much versatility, no matter the project.

The Jumperlux is a passive component spin-off of the Jumperless project, both of which are from Architeuthis Flux, based out of Nevada in the United States. Their Twitter account shares an awesome behind-the-scenes look at a number of their projects, including the JumperLux.

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June 21st marked the summer solstice, the longest day of the year! The Sun is high in the sky, and shines as long as it can, giving us more daylight to enjoy and…. to harvest with solar power! Integrating solar power into your projects is easier than ever, and as the price of solar panels continues to drop as their efficiency rates rise, now is a great time to pick up a few panels to play with, like this High-Efficiency Circular Solar Panel.

These panels are high-efficiency models, meaning while most models on the market are about 17% to 20% efficient in converting solar power to electricity, this panel boasts a strong 22% efficiency rate. The solar panel has a maximum open circuit voltage of 7.0V and a peak voltage of 5.5V, making it perfect for charging single-cell lithium batteries or powering small circuits. If more power is needed though, several of these can be wired up in a series or parallel configuration, just like with other solar panels. An array of these cute, circular panels could be the perfect finishing touch to an outdoor project.

These solar panels, and a few others, are available from Open Green Energy, based in New Dehli, India. If you’re intrigued by solar power but don’t know where to start, give their Youtube channel a look for inspiration and education!

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I adore a clever, bespoke solution. The more niche, the better. What gets me curious is thinking about what other ways I could use that solution, designed to solve one problem, to solve an entirely different problem that the creator might not have even thought of! Maybe all these reasons are why the Burn Baby Burn PCB caught my attention.

The board is a nichrome cutter module, usually used in aeronautic projects, like high-altitude balloons and model aircraft. The cutter lets you cut through things like rubber bands and fishing lines to trigger a release system, like a parachute or drop sensor.

With a mounting hook for your line, and a mounting hole on the PCB to attach the module to your project, installation is straightforward. The burner is powered by a single-cell LiPo battery and draws a maximum of 1.2A with that 3.7V voltage. But wait, there’s more! The board accepts a PWM signal, so you can finetune the power to your exact requirements, also making the board easily controlled by your microcontroller of choice. The whole project is also open-source, with the board files and example Python code available in this Github.

This board was brought to us by concreted0g from the United Kingdom, and I would highly recommend taking a look at their shop. It’s full of other clever products, designed with rocketry and aeronautics projects in mind, but I could imagine a number of uses for this Drop Pin Switch.

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I am a firm believer in not reinventing the wheel- if there’s already a tool, circuit, or part out there that I can integrate into my projects, I’d much rather buy it than spend the time and material costs to try and arrive at the same solution someone else has already found. Maybe this approach is why the Touch Sensor Light Controller jumped out at me, offering a quick and affordable plug-and-play solution to DIY dimmable lighting.

The Touch Sensor Controller is perfect for adding an odd touch control to your lighting project, letting you turn just about anything conductive into a dimmable input device. The board also includes some safety features such as a 0.75A fuse and reverse polarity protection up to 30V. It is as clean and simple as PCBs come- with clear silkscreening, openly-shared documentation, and quick-connect terminals, integrating this PCB into your lighting projects is fast and easy.

This board comes to us from BlinkinLabs, which is based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. They have a huge shop with many products for LED work, including some incredibly helpful LED strip repair boards. Throw some of these dimming light controllers and some of their other products in your cart and get your next light show on the road!

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As the world moves towards being more and more data-driven, being able to verify the numbers you’re being charged for can offer peace of mind. And in Europe, where energy prices are climbing, an easy solution to checking your own energy consumption and using that data for your own decision-making has a lot of appeal to the clever maker. The Micro Teleinfo V3.0 is a timely update to a long-standing project that offers a USB adapter for the Teleinfo energy meters in France.

The Micro Teleinfo board has gone through a number of updates over the years, and its simplicity and small form factor are the clear results of those iterations. Setup requires running just two cables to I1 and I2 on the meter, and the blue LED should light up, indicating the Teleinfo signal is being received! All the code and required serial commands are available here on the project’s Github, along with plenty of detailed walkthroughs for integrating this into python-based projects.

There are a few different options for this board available in the listing as well, with choices between the type of connector, and different PCB styles. Charles is a maker from Montamisé, France, and has a number of other Teleinfo-related boards available. Be sure to check where they ship to before hitting that purchase, so you don’t have any unpleasant surprises!

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A pet peeve of mine has always been the lack of camera peripherals for microcontrollers. I look at the listing and cry out to the skies, “why, oh why, do we all think microprocessors are the minimum requirement for any photo capturing?!”

Okay, maybe I’m not that dramatic, but when I see a listing for a microcontroller-based camera, I do get very excited. So when the T-Camera S3 was posted on Tindie, it was just as quickly added to my cart.

This wonderful little module is built with an ESP32 board at its heart, meaning right out of the gate, you have WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity! The included camera has a resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels, an Ultra-Extended Graphics Array (UXGA) resolution. There is also a Passive Infrared sensor and microphone on board, giving you lots of fun peripherals to play with. And something this kit offers that I haven’t seen in others is the inclusion of a 128 x 64-pixel OLED screen, giving you a way to confirm captured data and wireless transmission.

This kit is offered by Lilygo, the China-based open-source store. If you’re looking to pick one up soon, I’d hurry, because the store is going on a break starting January 14th. The Tindie listing for the T-camera lets you choose between just the populated board and accessories, or adding the case as well.

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If you’ve ever lived through a cicada summer, you are familiar with the deep penetration their cries will inflict on your brain. For the blissfully unaware, this sound will follow you throughout your day and into the dusk hours, the drone eventually integrating into the white noise of your mind. But there’s something fascinating about the sound cicadas produce for me, especially having lived in the southern United States most of my life. I’ve got through summers where the cicadas were so prolific, I had to sweep them off of my windshield before driving to work each morning. So when I saw the Cicada 2.0 Solar Sounder, a PCB for reproducing the sound with a digital twist, I was intrigued, to say the least.

This is an unpopulated PCB with some gorgeous masking artwork and enough components labels to feel like an achievable DIY, you have the chance to make your own cicada calls with this project. If you’ve got a drawer full of spare components you’re looking to clear out, this project is an excellent opportunity to do so, as you’re encouraged to try different values to play with the signal. And an element that rings so creative and thematic is the inclusion of a solar panel as the power source. The fluctuation of light over the day will change the signal, much like how the pitch and volume of the cicadas change as the day goes on. For extra flair, try sticking the panel under some meandering shadows cast by a nearby tree, and see what sound a partially obscured solar panel makes.

If you already yearn for the summer months and what sounds that may bring, pick up this project and bring those summer months to you. It’s made by Graham’s Gear Bazaar, based in the United States. They also provide a detailed BoM with the package, if you’re looking for a bit more guidance in your cicada signal project build!

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One of the few complaints one could have about the Pixhawk drone flight controller is an issue with running extended-length I2C cables. Not only does making a cable extension usually involve some pretty finicky cable making, but most drone components come with JST connectors as well for structural integrity. And even if you were to build that longer cable, the EMF signature that drone motors produce is more likely to interfere with your signal integrity. To answer that problem, the TFI2CEXT module is here to give you an easy fix to a complicated scenario.

One of the greatest benefits of this board is its ease of hookup, with a JST-GH connector on both ends, compatible with the PixHawk connection standard. It also features power and
“ready” status LED indicators, plus the extender can perform a device reset if any issues arise midflight. Additionally, the routing on this board is done in such a way as to easily allow nesting of other I2C devices if you’ve already got pre-existing cabling onboard. All other documentation, including the PCB layout and exact dimensions of the board, are also available on the product’s Github page!

This I2C module is brought to us by ThunderFly, the Czechia-based drone supplier. They have a number of other drone accessories as well, including this Air Speed Sensor and this IR and Magentic Probe, in case you’d like to pick up some sensors to connect to your brand new I2C extender! Check out their page and see all the wonderful drone-based goodies they offer.

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There are few communication protocols in the world of electronics more ubiquitous than I2C and SPI. Almost every single project of mine uses one or the other, and it is superb for a number of purposes, like cutting down on the number of pins required, being able to piggy-back multiple sensors onto a single line, and transmitting data over wired connections without the need to develop your own checksums and the like. One major restriction though has always been how far you can run those wires which carry the communication signal. But with the newly released JARViE Extender, you can now send those signals over twisted pair cables up to 150ft!

The board uses the TI P82B715 buffer IC to be able to transmit I2C, SPI, or GPIO signals over cable and includes an RJ45 connector onboard to make hookup a breeze. The board can also handle bi-directional data transfers and has a dual bi-directional unity-voltage-gain buffer that doesn’t require external direction control, keeping it simple to use. And be sure to visit the product page and see the great work the maker did to document and verify the signal transmission integrity along a variety of lengths of cable. You can even see a live demo and breakdown of the communication board below!

This board is offered by JARViE, based in the United States. Their Tindie store has a number of other smart home and IoT products, like this Mini Powerline Communications board, which lets you communicate between different boards over AC or DC power lines.

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