Tindie

Using a Raspberry Pi 4 might be exactly what your next project needs, but what if you need a way to protect that bare circuit board? The Raspberry Pi 4 Slim Case from Kismet Wireless might be just what you’re looking for.

The Raspberry Pi 4 Slim Case is a slim-fitting acrylic case used to protect all the device’s components on the top and the bottom. It provides protection without restricting access to the much-needed ports or SD card slots.

Each product includes a top piece, SD card spacers, a matte black bottom piece, and hex nuts and spacers. There are even several style options to choose from.

Style options include:

• Barcode, a black and white striped design.
• Biohazard, a red and white design with a biohazard symbol.
• Circuitry, a black and silver design featured in the photo above.
• Hex Scale, a white and black patterned design.
• Kismet.JP Logo & Katakana, a black and white design.
• Kismet Signals, a black and white design.
• Matte Black, a fingerprint-resistant black with no design.
• Radiation, a yellow and black design with the radiation warning symbol.

With so many options, it won’t be difficult to find something that matches the personality or theme of your next project.

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Tabletop music making is a fun and accessible way of creating electronic adventures without the need for a soundproofed pro-spec studio – just get in your kitchen and plug in some headphones! The Sismo Samba Desktop is a lovely little analog percussion synth with tonnes of features and connections to interface with other musical gear, well built for some rugged rhythm sessions!

This semi-modular percussion synth with 6 sequencers, 5 sinewave generators and a whopping 6 oscillators – each with a choice of triangle and square waves. This makes for an awesome selection of audio out, cv in, and frequency changing controls to patch internally or to send to other modular destinations. Listen below to hear the groovy minimal goodness this box has to offer.

It can be sync’d to other gear to act as your primary percussion, and would be prime for running through some outboard effects. It comes fully built with a power supply included, and covers roughly 31 x 15 x 13 cm of your kitchen work surface – just keep it away from the sink!

The Samba percussion synth is sold by Sismo Sounds who are based in Portugal, check out their store for more electronic goodies. Check out the SoundCloud links below to hear what it can do!

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Is it just me, or is anyone else being driven crazy by their neighbor’s kids or maybe children of your own? As a former teacher and hyper kid, playing games were always a good way to keep busy and have some fun. Check out the Ledring, a circuit powered by Arduino that can be used to create games with LEDs.

The Ledring is made up of nineteen LEDs; eighteen red LEDs and one green LED. One of the main games that can be played with this device is the Ledcatching game. The player tries to hit the button just as the green LED passes to catch it in motion.

Another game that can be played is Ledoverlap, which was created by Circle Electronic. In this game, the LEDs flash clockwise and when the last one lights up, the user must press the button and continue to repeat this action for all eighteen LEDs as the speed increases with each round.

Each Ledring comes fully assembled, and is powered by two CR2032 batteries. You can use your own Arduino Nano, or add one to your order. Now, time for me to go buy a ton of these to occupy my upstairs neighbor’s kids for a few minutes of peace and quiet. Actually, I might just have to buy one for myself to play with!

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I’ve been slowly adding more gadgets to my home automation setup. I typically use voice control, but I’ve been searching for a nicely packaged interface for controlling devices, and the HA SwitchPlate from Derusha Digital Designs is a very clean and modern looking home automation controller. Designed to fit into an existing lightswitch box, it uses a 2.4″ TFT touchscreen display for interaction.

The GUI looks very well-designed and easy to navigate. The HASP has been designed to work with Home-Assistant.io or openHAB, but because it uses MQTT it can easily work with just about any existing home automation solution. With the help of websites like IFTTT, it could be leveraged to control devices that are part of your Google Home ecosystem, for example.

The designers are quick to point out that this is not a drop-in solution; you will have to do some legwork and setup to integrate it into existing systems. This is the controller for the hacker, not the consumer. Despite this, it has the polished look of a consumer product, which is a great selling point.

I’m very impressed with their excellent documentation. It covers basic set-up and integration with Home-Assistant, as well as pointers for how to integrate with other systems. I’m pretty confident that any hacker who has worked with MQTT before will have no problem. As an open-source project, you can also dig into the source code to modify it however you wish. I’m sure that many end users will want to make changes to the GUI to include new features, or change the colour scheme, etc. The code is written as an Arduino sketch for the ESP8266, and it is well-commented and easy to read.

Overall, this looks like an excellent solution, and one I am strongly considering using one in my own apartment! Kudos to Derusha Digital Designs for such a slick and clean design.

If you need an MQTT debugging tool, I’d like to give a shoutout to MQTTCute, an excellent tool designed by my friend and Hackaday contributor Maya Posch. I’ve used it many times for MQTT projects and it’s a great tool for quickly subscribing and publishing to MQTT topics.

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Programming your own musical interfaces is getting more and more accessible, with the advent of the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Teensy boards to create your own musical hardware. This MIDI Breakbout Board is an attachment for the Teensy which puts 10 MIDI sockets at your disposal, with MIDI in and out to communicate to your synths, effects units, and drum machines.

The Teensy does a great job as a high fidelity audio processor as well as being perfect for sending and receiving data. This addition to the board connects real-world MIDI devices to the Teensy, allowing for MIDI merging, splitting, filtering or sequencing – depending on what you want to make. You can trigger synths with a sequence of MIDI notes, control the speed of Drum Machines via MIDI Clock, or send Control Changes to any outboard device!

This breakout board is compatible with Teensy 4 and is powered from the Teensy itself. It comes as a PCB alone for total construction (see the attached BOM), a kit of full parts, and there’s an add-on option with acrylic panels as an enclosure.

The Teensy MIDI Breakout Board is sold by Deft Audio who are based in the USA. Other boards are available for earlier Teensy models from their shop!

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DIY pen plotters and lasers have become increasingly popular, and some pretty awesome creations circulating Twitter. This new product, from Bart Dring, will help you jump on the creative plotter train!

The ESP32 CNC Pen / Laser Controller is a small yet powerful CNC controller that you can use for your next DIY pen plotter or laser engraver project! The Grbl_ESP32 firmware running on the board offers users a new level of power and features a 32-bit dual-core processor, 120kHz step rates, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a 16-bit laser power control, just to name a few.

The controller includes the following useful features:

• 5V 3A Step Down Power Supply
• (1) High Current Output
• (1) Hobby Servo Connector
• Laser Power PWN Connector
• (2) Limit / Home Switch Connectors
• Power Output Connection for the Laser Module
• Removable Mirco SD Card
• Standard DC Barrel Connector
• (2) Stepper Motor Driver Sockets

The PCB comes tested and fully assembled. There are also optional add-on items, two DRV8825 Stepper drivers, or a programmed ESP32. The ESP32 CNC Pen / Laser Controller could be exactly what your next laser engraving or pen plotter project needs to make your it stand out!

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Add doors to the list of items you’ve made part of your home automation system. The TeHyButton Mini makes the status of your door something that’s available over WiFi, it’s the perfect addition to make your home a little more secure.

The TeHyButton Mini is a small, low-power sensor that connects to your home WiFi network and logs doors being open and closed. When a door is opened users can receive alerts via their mobile devices or by email.

Data can be sent via a few different methods: a free cloud data logging service via tehybug.com, an HTTP POST or GET request to a custom remote Web Server, or a custom MQTT broker. This device can run off a 9V battery and no power is consumed when the device is in the closed-door state.

TeHyButton is based on the ESP8266 module that provides a connection to WiFi (don’t worry, there are detailed instructions for your first start). It comes pre-flashed and pre-installed data logging software, to get it up and running just install the included magnetic sensor on your door and door jamb. It’s an easy way to enhance your home security while making your smart home just a little smarter in the process.

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The Sensiron STS35 temperature sensor is a factory calibrated digital temperature sensor, with accuracy of ±0.1°C. As with any sensor, having a breakout board is important, but this ClosedCube STS35 breakout board ticks all the right boxes for me.

The designer of a breakout board needs to understand the potential applications, and the most important things a developer might want to change. For a temperature sensor, it’s important to have the sensor physically isolated from the rest of the circuitry to ensure the measured temperature is correct. This is taken care of by putting the sensor on its own little island of PCB, with a thin section of PCB connecting it to the breakout pins. This helps isolate it thermally.

Because this sensor uses I2C, another important thing developers might want to change is the I2C address. Including a DIP switch for address changing shows that the designer understands what people want to do with this sensor (using multiples on the same I2C bus). The DIP switch also allows you to enable and disable the I2C pull-up resistors in they case they’re already included in the microcontroller board you plan to attach to this.

I love seeing well-thought out boards like this. The differences might seem trivial, but when you are in the middle of a debug session, little touches like this can make the job so much easier. The small size is also important, allowing the developer to take advantage of the small size of the sensor itself. There’s nothing more annoying than a temperature sensor in the middle of a huge PCB!

The best part of all? The price includes two of these breakouts, meaning you can take advantage of the I2C address changes and daisy-chain them together. The sensor accepts voltages from 2.5-5.5V, which easily handles 2.5V, 3.3V and 5V logic. It also has a resolution of 0.01°C and has an ALERT output which can drive a microcontroller interrupt line in case the temperature goes outside of pre-defined ranges.

If you’re looking for a small, reliable and high-accuracy temperature sensor, the STS35 is a great choice, and this breakout board is an excellent way to develop with it!

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The Atari Punk  Console is a classic of the DIY synth kit genre – bursting with 8-Bit chiptune melodies, crazed glitched-up sound effects and pitch-shifting drones!  This particular Atari Punkr Kit is an expanded version of the original, and is available in kit form with everything you need to make lo-fi chaos in seconds!

The Atari Punkr Kit has expanded on the original design by adding an LFO, 7-Bit binary counter and more! It’ll make shape shifting arpeggios, sci-fi drones, squarewave PWM madness and everything in between – making it a great source of serendipitous audio experiments. It comes with a stereo output socket for playback on headphones or through a mixer, and has a built in speaker to transmit your tones into the airwaves. With controls for pitch, LFO rate and pulsewidth – you’ll quickly discover how blissfully incendiary portable music can be!

This is an excellent beginner kit, which is rewarding to make as you get such a range of noises from one tiny PCB! We have covered Atari Punkr Kits on the blog before, so this might be considered as the big brother/sister of the smaller kit offered by Rakit.

This Atari Punkr Kit is sold by ubid.it who are based in the USA and have a whole catalogue of cool audio products to choose from!

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Just about any project will require some sort of input device for the user to interact with it. Whether that’s a simple switch, sensor, or more advanced input, many of us will opt for a keyboard as our preferred method of electronic interaction.

This BB Q10 Keyboard in PMOD format offers a simple and efficient way to add a full QWERTY keyboard to your next project. It uses an ATSAMD20 chip to poll the keyboard and relay key presses into a FIFO. An I2C interface also lets you read the FIFO, configure the chip, and control the backlight. Key information can be obtained via polling or interrupts. The firmware and protocols are readily available.

This particular keyboard also minimizes the pins needed to interface with it, bringing the number down from 12 to 2 or 3, based on interrupt usage. Keep in mind that the keyboard itself isn’t included by default, but can be added to the purchase on the store page if you don’t want to source one yourself.

When all is said and done, this relatively simple kit lets you quickly add a full keyboard to your projects without too much hassle.

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