We at Tindie love a bit of retro-tech, and what better way to enjoy the sounds of the late 80s and early 90s than listening to your favorite Chiptunes? The Simple Chiptune Player puts the power of sonic nostalgia in your pocket, with a simple programmable signal generator to load full tracks and sound effects to play back and enjoy.
The player uses Yamaha’s Programmable Signal Generator (PSG) chip, the YMZ294, to generate the sweet bleeps and bloops. An ATmega328 handles the playback and can be programmed over USB using the Arduino IDE.
There’s a built in speaker for standalone playback, as well as a 3.5mm headphone output. Here’s a nice overview of the layout and workings of the player:
The Simple Chiptune Player is sold by microwavemont, coming from Japan and usually ships from there within one day. A selection of example sketches to get you started are available on GitHub.
Check out this video on it, and head over to the product page for more information.
Pi Wars 2019 is just around the corner! To coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landings, this year’s competition is space exploration-themed. For the uninitiated, Pi Wars is an international, challenge-based robotics competition. Teams are tasked with building Raspberry Pi-controlled robots and competing in non-destructive challenges to earn points.
The Pi Wars obstacle course in 2018
The contest spans over a single weekend and supports up to 76 teams from all over the world. This year marks the fifth iteration of Pi Wars, which takes place March 30th and 31st in Cambridge, UK. Schools and kids clubs will compete on Saturday, while beginners, intermediates, and advanced teams compete on Sunday. If you’re interested in spectating, tickets are still available. You can also follow along on Twitter by tracking the hashtag #PiWars.
Pi Noon, 2018
Tindie & Pi Wars 2019
We are proud to be sponsoring Pi Wars this year by offering a gift card and Tindie Blinky Badge Kit to the 120+ members of the participating teams. While we can’t be there in person this year, last year we had a blast participating in the marketplace and meeting such an inspiring and dedicated community.
Pi Wars Challenge Hall, 2018
One of the prior year’s winners is a fellow Tindarian. Brian Corteil, who sells the Coretec Tiny 4WD on Tindie, also penned a comprehensive list of tips for Roboteers that offers some excellent strategies for building your own capable robot.
Robot based on the Coretec Tiny 4WD chassis
Special thanks to Michael Horne, Tim Richardson, and all of the amazing volunteers and sponsors that make this unique competition possible. And of course, we wish all of the 2019’s teams the best of luck!
My dad is not quite the gamer that I am, but one thing we’ve always had in common is a mutual love for flight simulators. These hyper-realistic experiences are even better when you have equipment like a joystick or throttle that adds to the immersion.
Another popular role is to handle radio communications from the air traffic control tower. That’s where the Flight Simulation Radio kit comes in. This kit is compatible with X-Plane using ArdsimX, but it’s also usable with Microsoft FSX and Prepar3D (with limited support).
The kit comes complete with everything you need, but some basic soldering skills are required. You can even daisy-chain kits together to form a full radio stack. The radio is programmable for Nav, Comm, Transponder, ADF, Groundspeed, or any other output from the simulator.
Having seen some of the incredible wearable fashion out there, I’m convinced that the intersection of tech and fashion is the future. Not only are clothes like this unique and interesting, but in many cases they’re also incredibly functional.
While we wait for wearable fashion to catch on, options like these Halopixels offer the chance to spice up your wardrobe with a little programmable pizazz. With 12 RGB addressable LEDs and a small form factor, this device works well as an earring, ring, pendant, necklace, or anything else your imagination comes up with.
It’s about the size of a coin, with a fully charged 3.6V 2032 coin battery delivering 3 hours of continuous battery life. By using your own BLE microcontroller, you can program the LEDs and customize both the color and blinking pattern.
There’s no denying the aesthetic quality of an aquarium. There’s a reason why you see them in lounges, offices, and the like. That being said, they can be a lot of work to keep your aquatic friends happy and healthy.
Thanks to the DOMOVOY, you won’t need to worry about keeping them fed. This automatic fish feeder allows you to set specific times for dispensing food. A proprietary algorithm also prevent jams in the feeder. You can even control it remotely via a smartphone or integrate it into a larger smart home system.
It supports dry, finely granulated, or flake fish food. With a 3D-printed case and a convenient display, this is one solution that’s easy to implement and takes another task off of your daily list.
For a beginner, the world of electronics, hardware, and circuits is a daunting prospect. Finding out where to begin with it all is a monumental task, but it doesn’t have to be. Thanks to makers all over Tindie, beginners have more resources now than they ever have in the past to dive into this vast and rich world.
The Edu-Kit 01 is an introduction to electronics and circuits that allows you to carry out ten different experiments. At the time of this writing, the instructions are only in Italian, but I’m sure there’s a linguist out there who will help translate them into other languages.
For those who read Italian, the instructions provide all of the steps needed to create the electronic circuits in each experiment. The kit includes a prototyping board, electronic components, and cables that you can use without the need for complex assembly.
The experiments include things like turning on an LED, learning about Ohm’s law, creating sounds with a buzzer, light sensors, and plenty more. The components in this kit are perfect for beginners to work on their own experiments as well!
Modular units are all about versatility and multi-functionality, with many users after a device which is flexible and can be applied to numerous sonic scenarios. Blinkenlights have released their Vactrol Drum for Eurorack which delivers a huge range of real and unreal drum and percussive sounds for your modular noodles requiring low end thunder and high frequency sizzles!
The Vactrol Drum employs a white noise generator (similar to the Roland TR-808) through a vactrol filter and VCA to generate kick drums, rimshots and hihats, as well as alien bleeps, squeeks and crashes. Controls include amplitude, resonance, attack, decay, bias and pitch envelope with gate and trigger inputs – to sculpt the sound depending on what you need. The unit has voltage controlled pitch, and can work as a noisy oscillator which the resonance turned up!
It comes as a PCB and panel with an extensive build guide (PDF), with BOM, schematics and test instructions to ensure it’s all good – the PCB silkscreen shows the names and values of all the components which makes construction that much easier! The finished unit is 4HP wide, 3U High and 100mm deep, and available now from the Blinkenlights Tindie Store!
If there’s one thing we’ve all lost at one time or another, it’s the remote. As a kid, I remember my parents always asking where the TV remote got off too, and it was often in obscure places. To this day, I still find myself wandering the living room at night hunting down that illusive piece of hardware.
One thing I’ve never lost track of, however, is my smartphone. For many of us, these devices might as well be attached to our hands. If you find yourself without a remote for your smart TV, or you want to use your computer away from the desk, MyTeletouch offers an interesting solution.
This simple USB dongle plugs into your computer or smart TV and then pairs it to your smartphone via Bluetooth. All you need beyond the hardware is a free app which is available on Android, iOS, and Windows app stores.
Once you’ve made the connection, you can switch seamlessly between mouse, keyboard, and joystick functionality right on your phone. While there are still some kinks to work out in the software side of things, the video below shows that it’s working pretty well!
With the PlayStation 4 as the main focus of console gamers, the PS3 and its DualShock 3 controllers haven’t had a lot of love in recent years. If you have any sitting around collecting dust (guilty!), the Axisdapter can give them a new lease on life.
This PCB connects to the flat ribbon connector on the main PCB of the PS3 controller, something only the OEM models have (so no third-party ones). Once installed, the buttons on the stock controller are replaced by the terminal blocks on this PCB. However, the stock controller retains the gyroscope and thumb sticks, which opens up the possibility to make flight stick builds or other types of custom controllers.
Freneticamnesic created this board and used it to help them turn a DualShock 3 into a virtual pinball machine controller, but the possibilities go far beyond that. You’ll need to sacrifice a DS3 for this project, but it’s for a good cause!
Jason Hotchkiss has been a Tindie seller for longer than most, with a diverse range of best-selling products for music making under his Sixty Four Pixels moniker. His devices have proven to be hugely popular and influential in the music tech world, with rave reviews flooding in and a customer list which reads like a who’s who of music! We thought it would be a nice idea to sit down with him to find out how it all began, what motivates his passion for gadgets and how he approaches their design.
Beginnings
Jason was a child of the 70s, where anything electronic tended to be well outside of a child’s pocket money budget. He would fantasize about owning a Nintendo Game & Watch or CGL Galaxy Invaders game with the colored VFD screen. At the time he didn’t ever consider it was something he might one day understand the workings of or be able to replicate.
As a child he enjoyed messing about with batteries, light bulbs, switches and wire, making a hobby of electrics rather than electronics. He says: “I was terrible for taking apart any toy or gadget with electrical bits in and using the parts to make other things, which I’d then usually take into school and get them confiscated by a teacher. A few electric shock makers and a motorized ballpoint pen scribbling machine went that way”.
Aside from electronics, he messed with sound too. His stepdad had a reel-to-reel tape recorder which he used to make a delay loop with, experimenting with feedback and pitch shifting. He also had an old calculator with an LED display that would interfere with AM radio signals and produce whistly tones depending on what key you pressed, which was, technically his first synth!
Jason didn’t get into serious electronic circuits until pretty recently (when he was almost 40 years old) crediting the late, great, Ray Wilson and his Weird Sound Generator (WSG) project for the start of that – “I was doing a lot of music collaboration projects online and someone had made one and it got me hooked. From there, it was on to Arduino and MIDI then there was no going back!”
Programming
Jason got his first computer at the age of 13 – a Sinclair ZX-81, followed soon after by a ZX Spectrum which he tried to program from the moment he switched it on, as he couldn’t afford to buy any games. In a time before tape-to-tape copies of games started doing the rounds at school, Jason was writing his own to play! Just about everyone with a home computer was trying to make their own games – it was a golden age where a schoolkid could realistically write a hit game on their own, in their bedroom.
“I spent most of my early teens shut away in my room with the Spectrum plugged into some massive old black and white TV set of dubious electrical safety, working on some DIY game till the early hours”. It turned out to be time well spent as Jason became a professional coder in his later life.
Installations
As a member of the local Hackspace in Brighton Jason would encounter local artists coming along for help on electronic projects for interactive art projects. He helped one artist out with a ‘Noisy Table’ installation using contact microphones, time measurement, and maths to work out where a ball hit a table tennis table surface. The result was then used to trigger and modulate sounds via MIDI!
From his involvement in the Hackspace, he was asked if he wanted to be involved in an Electronic Art exhibition, where he made his ‘Hammer Pong’ game/installation, using six 5 meter addressable LED strips. The game is played by hitting big foam blocks with big soft hammers to send the ball (a pulse of light) back along the strip, in a similar way to pong mixed with the old test-of-strength fairground game.
More recently Jason displayed two pieces at Fort Process sound art festival in Newhaven, where he exhibited a playable musical instrument that used two high voltage Tesla coils to make tuned sparking sounds that could be played by visitors using a MIDI keyboard. In the adjacent room, he had an exhibit where audio signals from a set of audio oscillators were fed into the clock and data lines of a large LED matrix, creating chaotic dancing patterns and hypnotic droning sounds!
MIDI
Jason’s fascination is with sounds and controlling them; he loves the idea of generating electronic music in unexpected, random ways based on real world objects and interactions, stating that “MIDI is just the most accessible and sensible way of linking things up”. An early project of his used light sensors fixed on lava lamps to trigger and modulate sounds in synth software on a PC, with MIDI making a seemingly complicated setup relatively straightforward.
Jason loves MIDI for its simplicity and efficiency, while he enjoys having flexibility to add new features which the original designers couldn’t have anticipated. The fact it’s still the industry standard after nearly 40 years shows how great it really is.
Programming Products
Most of his Tindie products have some kind of firmware programming, which means there is a computer chip on board which runs the program that makes the device work. He’s mainly used 8-bit PIC micro-controllers since they’re reliable and come with useful on-chip peripherals. “I program these in plain old C and have got to know the hardware really well so can program them without any libraries or OS”. He’s recently started working with 32-bit ARM chips for some new projects, which he informs me are becoming a new favorite.
In terms of project satisfaction, Jason says that nothing beats a spark gap Tesla coil putting out half a million volts of 3 foot sparks! “However, the fact it sounds like the space-time continuum is being ripped apart and might quickly result in neighbors calling the police means run-times are short, but very sweet”.
Sixty Four Pixels
When Jason first started selling, it was a couple of sales via private messages from people who wanted to make versions of his YouTube projects. Someone eventually told him about Tindie and he got started here. “In the early days all the sellers used to have a Google hangout with founder Emile once a week!” so what started out as a hobby around his 9 to 5 coding job has soon become full time employment.
Going back a couple of years he was doing freelance coding 3 days a week, so utilized the days off to do his own thing – ramping things up and even starting to employ a couple of friends a day a week to aid the production process. This year, through the success of his MIDI devices, Jason has started renting a workshop space for the business. “I am still not sure how long I can go on before I need to get back to some proper work, but I hope never!”
Prototype to Product
For Jason, the most important thing is that the idea is exciting and is something that he would use himself. From there he thinks about the functionality he’d like, and the flow of using the device. He admits to spending a lot of time pressing imaginary buttons on paper sketches of control panels and thinking through how the device might respond! He thinks it’s important to realize some parts of the user-functionality will determine key points in the hardware design – for example what inputs and outputs are needed, how many components and how the user will interact with it, so it’s important to do so before getting an initial PCB design made up.
“Once I have an initial PCB prototype working I often spend months playing with ideas in the firmware coding. I like to try things out in a jam session environment and in some cases I’ve decided I don’t actually like a new idea and end up putting it on the back burner”.
He used to design PCBs and home etch the prototypes but nowadays he finds it cheap and quick to get factory made PCBs, so he goes straight to that while having a few projects in the pipeline at the same time so he can work on something else while waiting for PCBs to come back.
Jason will give a couple of friends prototype models to try out for their feedback. He also finds writing a user guide is a good way to verbalize ideas and see what makes sense – helping to streamline certain parts of the user work flow within the code, before it’s on sale.
Recommended Reading
Jason recommends starting with an Arduino board and reading the Arduino forums, Hackaday projects and places like Instructables for some basic LED projects to get started. Once you have the basics, a custom MIDI controller is a good first music based Arduino project.
After that, he recommends looking at the Teensy board from PJRC and the fantastic Teensy Audio Library which allows you to create your own digital synthesizers, samplers and audio effects – with seemingly immediate results. Alternatively, if you want to try the analog route, Jason recommends soldering synths and effects from DIY kits, and experimenting with your own circuits: “This stuff is still mostly black magic to me!”
Jason’s products reside in the studios of Jean Michele Jarre, Pete Townsend, Vince Clarke, Little The Freemasons, NZCA Lines and many more, which he puts down to the time he takes trying to pack features into his products. He likes to ‘feature creep’ as much as he can into one unit, with as many useful functions as he can think of. “Sometimes among the most unlikely set of features, a wonderfully novel gem of functionality emerges and I’d like to think part of the appeal is unique and useful features!”
We continue to be impressed, intrigued and astounded by Jason’s products, and like many in the music world, are anticipating his new gadgets for more melody, rhythm and fun in our studios. Keep an eye on his Tindie Store for all his goodies – thanks Jason!
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The Simple Chiptune Player is sold by microwavemont, coming from Japan and usually ships from there within one day. A selection of example sketches to get you started are available on GitHub.
