Tindie

I’m a huge fan of Halloween and costume parties. Besides, who doesn’t love an awesome costume? Life can be a little monotonous at times, and what better way to add some fun, than with a ridiculously over the top costume.  With these RGB LED Shades, your costume will surely light up the party!

The RGB LED Shades are a DIY kit for creating a pair of wearable LED light-up glasses. You can even program custom graphics or messages. This kit is created and sold by macetech.

The kit is easily assembled and powered by USB. The glasses feature an LED panel with 68 full-color pixels. Even though the LEDs are very bright on the outside the design is made so that you can still see through the slots.

The shades come preloaded with patterns, for those who want to enjoy them without writing code. However, if you enjoy hacking you can go crazy coding your own custom patterns. Thanks to the Shades Audio Sensor, you can even hack them to dance to music with display sound-reactive patterns.

Keep Reading ›

Lithium polymer and lithium ion batteries — like all rechargeable batteries — have a limited lifespan determined by the number of charge/discharge cycles. Leaving your phone plugged in all the time increases the strain on the battery, reducing its useful lifespan and wasting energy. The ProCharge goes in-line with your charge cable, and automatically delays and monitors charging of your device. This way, you still wake up with a fully charged phone, but you’ve reduced the strain on the battery and saved some energy by not powering the phone at idle all night!

There are software solutions available for both major phone OSes, but they cannot actually stop the phone from charging — they merely remind you to unplug the phone when it hits a certain charge percentage. This can also protect the battery, but you end up without a fully charged phone, and if you fall asleep before the notification goes off, it’s useless. Having a hardware solution like this is much more reliable, and doesn’t require user intervention, which means you’re more likely to actually see results!

This graph shows the potential energy savings. By delaying the charge cycle, you are saving energy, which adds up to about 90 days per year that you aren’t charging your phone!

Because smartphone manufacturers are aware of the limited lifespan of lithium batteries, they have attempted to mitigate these issues in software. The phone can detect if the voltage starts dropping quickly when current increases — the sign of a weak or nearing end-of-life battery — and it responds by lowering the clock speed of the CPU. This leads to the device acting sluggish and often causes stability issues. However, if the phone continued to run at full speed, it would quickly drop the battery below its cutoff voltage and the phone would just shut off. Apple was vilified in the media a while ago for slowing down their older phones, but I suspect it was just this mechanism in action. They were trying to preserve what little battery health the phones still had left!

Check out the product page and learn more about how the ProCharge works. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the ProCharge could add months to the lifespan of a smartphone battery!

Keep Reading ›

Arcade machines were overwhelmingly made by Japanese companies, which is why the standard they ended up using (JAMMA) was named after the Japan Amusement Machine and Marketing Association. This jam-packed PCB called the PARSEC Supergun allows using JAMMA PCBs outside of an old-school arcade cabinet. That means megafans of coin-op can play classics like the original Double Dragon II arcade game on a TV.

This is possible because of the aforementioned standard — though the games varied, the interfaces they used to connect to the display and controls remained the same. This allowed, for example, Donkey Kong machines to be turned into Donkey Kong Jr. machines. The nickname given to this type of device in the arcade community is a “SuperGun” — thus the name PARSEC SuperGun.

This compatibility is made even more convenient for home use with the PARSEC. All it needs is a standard ATX power supply, the JAMMA board you want to play, some sort of compatible input (Neo Geo controllers work), and a sound/composite display output. Presto! You can impress your friends by having the real deal running in your living room, and not an emulated machine like most modern cabinets use. It seems that customers love it too, as this product has a 5-star review rating on Tindie!

Tindie seller Low Budget have even included optional “hats” for VGA (with both composite and TTL output options), as well as component video. The JAMMA connector has the Japanese characters thoughtfully printed on it to make setup easier — a very nice touch. The standard board also has buttons to put the game into service or test modes — so you can play for free! You can, of course, attach a coin collector if you want your friends to bring quarters every time they drop by.

Here is the designer showing off an earlier (v1.0) revision of the board:

Keep Reading ›

As someone who loves PCB badges and all their unique designs, this one caught my eye. It stands out for two main reasons. The first is the aesthetic: a cute and colorful rocket design with LED eyes. The second is its purpose: the IT Girls PCB Badge (Rocket Badge) was created to promote STEM education for girls.

I’ve always had a love of computers and technology, but the thought of a career in engineering never occurred to me in high school. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood the field of engineering, or realized how much I love learning about it. More things like this badge may have started me on a path to engineering at an earlier age.

Promoting STEM education for kids is vitally important, and it’s something that we don’t always see marketed to young girls.

This neat badge kit, from AdvanceIT, is perfect for beginners and contains 1 PCB, 2 color changing LEDs, 1 switch, and 1 battery holder. All you need is a CR1220 battery and a neck strap if you desire one.

This badge also features an empty white area where kids can write their names. Whether for a kid interested in learning how to solder, or and adult beginner, the IT Girls PCB Badge is the perfect place to start!

Keep Reading ›

Retro gaming has had a huge resurgence in recent years, for musical reasons as much as old school gaming nostalgia. The SNES/PDIF is a device to allow perfect digital audio output from the Super Nintendo, capable of optical and coxial output. Those looking for hi-fidelity audio from their game collection or for super sampling capabilities will have a super clean and crisp signal to enjoy.

The SNES/PDIF is a simple double-board mod kit which uses a mini TOSLINK socket, for dual output formats and requires just a 5mm hole drilled in the precious case. It’s been designed to keep the signal to noise ratio low by reducing the length of the lines to the serial board and having the signal routed away from the transmitter board. Included in the kit is everything you need to perform the modification, with two types of digital encoders to choose from.

With the likes of Look Mum No Computer delving deep into retro gaming synthesis, you’re sure to be inspired to make your own 16 or 8 Bit chiptunes, and devices like this make that experience all the more pleasurable. The SNES/PDIF was developed by Tindie seller Qwertymodo who is based in the USA.

Here’s a superb example of chiptunes on a SNES by Saitone:

Keep Reading ›

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder as the saying goes. I may not see “beauty” in a circuit diagram or a mathematical equation, but you can bet that I’ll write about something that takes a Fibonacci distribution and brings it to the world of LEDs. That? That’s beautiful.

The Fibonacci64 is an 86mm (3.3″) circular disc with 64 WS2812B RGB LEDs, all surface mounted in a Fibonacci distribution. While this is not the first design of its kind from Evil Genius Labs LLC, this version was meant to strike a balance between difficulty and cost.

While the layout itself is organic and therefore “messy” to some eyes, the proper animations can really create some impressive spiral effects. Each of the LEDs also has its own decoupling capacitor, which reduces noise.

You can even use the Data Out pin to connect more LEDs! Take a look at the video below to see it in action.

Keep Reading ›

The ARPIE is something you will have seen taking over the music hardware world in the last few years. With illustruious customers including the likes of Vince Clarke, Jean Michelle Jarre, Celldweller and many more, it’s the hardware arpeggiator the music industry needed! The Memotab is a tiny add-on for the ARPIE which stores up to 16 ‘snapshots’ of settings for instant patch recall.

The Memotab sits comfortably on the hack header expansion port, and was inspired by the CVtab add-on which opened the door (or DAW) to modular CV signal outputs as well as snapshot memories. It’ll save all your settings, including arp rate, pattern, length, span, scale, transpositions and loads more! This comes in handy for live performances where different settings are required to be loaded quickly from one track to another, without menu diving.

To function with the Memotab, your ARPIE must have firmware version 6.1+ which can be updated using a TTL programmer, which will come in handy in future to ensure you’re always up to date.

The ARPIE is available as a kit and a fully constructed unit from Tindie, and was created by Sixty Four Pixels in Brighton, England. Check out the ARPIE and its features here:

Keep Reading ›

Have you ever searched for a particular color, whether it’s for an art project, website design, or to paint your home, and just couldn’t seem to find it? Then, all of a sudden you’re walking down the street and there it is! The perfect color mixture of green and blue to create an ocean teal.

So, now that you’ve found the ideal color that you want for your new website, what do you do? You could take a photo and try to match up the color yourself, but that would take up a precious amount of time. The Cube – Portable Color Digitizer is here to help!

You no longer need to drive yourself crazy over the color, thanks to the Cube. It’s a color measurement tool that matches surfaces to popular color spaces and paint libraries. The interesting thing about the Cube is its ability to capture color from practically anything. Want the green color of a kiwi? Just snap the color and open up the companion app on your phone. The app reveals RGB, LAB, and CMYK values. You can also match the color to Photoshop’s built-in libraries.

This handy little tool takes the guesswork out of color matching and is quite useful for designers of any kind. The Cube is created and sold by Palette.

So what are you waiting for, get out there and capture a rainbow of handpicked colors for your next project!

Keep Reading ›

The Amiga 500 was an extremely popular personal computer that Commodore introduced in the late 1980s, and this replica Amiga motherboard could be the key to fixing broken ones! Commodore’s Amiga line of computers competed directly against both Atari’s ST line, and the IBM PCs and clones. Those who used Amigas truly loved them — in fact, there are still many Amiga users today. Some people are even still running bulletin board systems using Amigas!

The need for this replacement board arises from a common foe of many retro computers — the dreaded leaky backup battery. Most computers of the time had lithium rechargeable cells on-board to keep time and date, as well as BIOS options. Unlike modern computers which use easily replaceable CR2032 batteries, older machines would often use batteries soldered directly to the board, or odd batteries that were difficult to replace. To top it all off, many would forget about these batteries when storing their old computers. Twenty years later, they open the case and the acid has leaked, causing extensive, often irreparable damage to both the PCB and the components on it.

A PCB this size is no small feat and we commend Bob’s Bits for taking it on! He has also added many improvements, including better and more understandable silkscreen identifiers and quality-of-life improvements for the end user. If you’ve been looking to restore a damaged Amiga 500, this could be your ticket! Or it can be used to build the new and improved A500++ as seen in TheRetroManCave’s video below. We haven’t seen many products focused on the Amiga computers, and we’re very glad to see this one; hopefully it inspires others to take a look at these awesome classic computers.

Keep Reading ›

Like most people, I enjoy a good beer every once in a while, especially on a Friday night hanging out with friends after a long work week. One of my close friends is really into craft beer and has always talked about making a homebrewed batch of his own. 

Well, it turns out brewing beer at home isn’t as easy as baking a cake! Beer is more chemistry than cooking and at each stage in getting from boil to bottling, both time and temperature need to be monitored closely.This is where the convenient BrewMaster product comes in hand. 

BrewMaster is a WiFi-enabled brew controller that gives the user real-time control over their precious brewing process. It’s designed to be easy to use with your home brewing equipment. BrewMaster provides the user with a graphical representation of temperatures. This can be used to configure the target temperature throughout each stage of the brewing process. 

This product will also notify the user of each additional step. Users can design their own recipes using BeerSmith, and import them on BrewMaster to configure their mash session. 

Each kit includes a fully assembled professional PCB with two main connectors, a particle photon, a 3D printed case, a temperature sensor, and 12 months of access to the cloud system to configure, manage, and brew beer from any PC. 

So what are you waiting for? That delicious hoppy goodness isn’t going to brew itself!

Keep Reading ›