Tindie

It’s spring here in Tindie-land, at least for those sellers north of the equator! While some are unloading hardware in spring cleaning mode, if you’re in the mood to acquire more parts for your bin, there’s a wide variety of under-the-radar equipment in the Tindie Flea Market. Let’s see what’s on tap this month:

170,000 Resistors

Do you need a resistor for your latest simple robotics project? If that’s the case, then this is not what you’re looking for. On the other hand, if you need thousands upon thousands of resistors for your latest massive project, then this lot should keep you going for some time!

B-Grade PCBs

Some PCBs just aren’t up to the necessary standards to make it into product form. These might be prototypes, damaged during fab or delivery, or just don’t work as expected. While normally thrown in the trash, one hacker’s trash is another hacker’s treasure, so seller Semachthemonkey has made rejected RC2014 PCBs available in lots of 6.

Mini Laser Engraver

Do you like lasers? Do you like your stuff marked so that no matter how hard someone tries to erase your mark on something it stays “Property of Hacker XYZ?” If so, then this PiBot Desktop Mini Laser Engraver is worth a look.

Apple Macbook Laptop

If you’re curious about the Mac world, but have never wanted to plunk down the cash to give it a try, here’s an interesting option: a mid-2017 notebook with 8 GB of ram, selling for under $300. And it actually works—though not guaranteed by Tindie per Flea Market rules. The seller is going back to PC again for unspecified reasons.

Negative Ion Generator

As your PC takes in and discharges air, why not embed negative ion to neutralize harmful substances? This device mounts in a 5.25 inch bay to do just that, and includes a blue on/off switch!

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Nostalgia is a powerful thing that drives makers to bridge the gap between the past and the present. Using vintage joysticks from the Commodore or Atari era on modern hardware is difficult, given the difference in connectors and technology.

These older controllers utilized 9 way D connectors, while modern emulators on PC/Pi devices utilize USB. What is needed is an adapter has the correct 9 way D inputs, with a separate USB output. Luckily, there’s an adapter on Tindie that allows any USB host to recognize vintage joysticks as USB controllers.

This adapter also supports arcade-style 4-way or 8-way joysticks and up to three arcade buttons. Modern game controllers are beautiful and easy to use, but this adapter lets you play the games the way you would have when they originally released.

The adapters come packaged as plug-and-play solutions so you won’t need to implement any drivers or perform any configurations. There is a single option or a dual option that registers two separate controllers for multiplayer.

The adapters allow vintage controllers to be used on a computer or a Raspberry Pi board, but they do not work in reverse so they won’t make your modern controllers work on vintage computer systems.

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Have you ever wished that your toaster could talk? Maybe your 3D Printer has a personality but lacks the ability to express it. Thanks to anthropomorph-EYES, our lifeless appliances can finally express themselves.  This is a kit that includes two 12-segment boards that give your appliances eyes capable of various expressions.

The boards are pre-loaded with the “judgmental” emotion and several other static expressions that can be cycled using a momentary button. They can be applied to the surface of appliances, devices, or anything else that could benefit from the ability to express itself.

The product page also includes free instructions for installation and programming custom expressions as well. Check out the video below for an example of these eyes being used on a typical toaster.

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Measuring exact power output can be a costly endeavor. Even something as simple as an RF power meter for measuring the levels of something like a WiFi card can break the bank. But this Wideband RF Power Meter is easy on the pocketbook and versatile too. It can be used to identify the exact output of your QRP rig, but it can also works on other devices.

Programmable oscillators, HamShields, and even Bluetooth Modules work with this meter. It functions like any other serial device. Once you plug it in, simply load your terminal program of choice. The meter will output the power levels in dBm every second and measure power from any frequency between 10MHz and 2700MHz. While the silkscreen does mention 45MHz and above, the seller has done testing to ensure it works below this range.

The simple USB serial functionality makes it easy to take quick measurements. Power levels beyond the +20dBm input can also be measured by using an external attenuator. The chip is primarily flat across the 39-2700MHz range, but each power meter also includes a calibration table for making corrections on specific frequency ranges down to 10MHz.

The Wideband RF Power meter is also open hardware and open software. The seller includes documentation and source code links on the product page.

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A WiFi connection in today’s modern age is right beneath things like food, water, and air in terms of necessity. Many of our devices are constantly seeking out wireless connections. Besides a password protection, we have very little control over what devices connect to our home networks.

Enter The WiFi Deauther Monster. This unique wireless hacking tool from Travis Lin allows you to perform a WiFi deauth attack or even beacon and probe request flooding. The result? You can select a client you want to be disconnected from the network and poof! They’re gone.

This device was originally designed for spacehuhn’s project ESP8266_deauther, but it is now for sale on Tindie as well. The device works by leveraging a de-authentication frame in the 802.11 Wi-Fi protocol. It’s normally used to safely disconnect clients from a wireless network.

The management packets themselves are unencrypted, so all you need is the mac address of the Wi-Fi router and of the client device you wish to disconnect. There’s no need to be connected to the network yourself, nor do you need to know the password.

Of course, a device like this is meant only for testing purposes on your own network. The device ships ready to use, but it does not include a battery. You could use two 3500 mAh 18650 batteries to power the board for 70 hours, for example.

It can also be a great way to familiarize and protect yourself from these types of attacks in the future. At the very least, it could be fun to rule over your network with an iron fist.

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Tindie is super excited to be coming to Dublin this week! Tindie is hosting a Bring-A-Hack in Dublin this Friday along with Hackaday and TOG Hackerspace the night before the Hackaday Dublin Unconference.

All you need to do for the Bring-a-Hack is to RSVP.

If you’re quick you might also snag a ticket for the Hackaday Dublin Unconference — check the link above. Join Jasmine Brackett, Tindie Product Manager, along with Mike Szczys, Editor-in-Chief of Hackaday, Contributing Editor Jenny List, Supplyframe Director of Product Sophi Kravitz, and about 150 other people from the Hackaday and Tindie Community for a day and a night of hardware talks, food and drinks, hacks and projects. We’d love to see you at both or either.

 Friday: Bring-A-Hack at TOG

Come hang out with Hackaday and Tindie night before the Hackaday Dublin Unconference. Thanks to TOG Hackerspace, we’re really pleased to host this Bring-a-Hack in the heart of Dubin on Friday evening.

Grab a small and easy to carry project you’d like to show off and come enjoy a tasty beverage and some light snacks on us. This is a great opportunity for visitors to Dublin or folks new to TOG to check it out and meet the members.

We’re looking forward to seeing what Dublin makers are working on, especially from local Seller PartFusion (who is also a TOG member and vouched for us for this event. Thank you!) and what’s new with AnalysisIR.

This event is open to anyone, so even if you can’t make it to the Unconference, we’d love to see you. RSVP on Eventbrite to let us know you’re coming.

Saturday: The Hackaday Dublin Unconference!

This is Hackaday’s first big event in Ireland and there’s going to be quite a turnout at the Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar. It did sell out, but there have been a few cancellations, so you may still be able to bag a ticket. Tickets are free, thanks to DesignSpark brought to you by RS, the exclusive sponsor of the event.

If you’re excited about a project or idea you’re working on right now, come prepared with a 7-minute talk and put your name down! It’s you and other community members who step up that makes this a great event. The one last September in London was ‘epic‘.

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The Raspberry Pi camera has allowed people to capture and process images, then process them using computer vision routines. There is only one camera port per Raspberry Pi port, a limitation that may pop up when delving into the computer vision world which benefits from eyes in many places at once.

While you could use multiple USB webcams, according to Raspberry Pi’s documentation, “the quality and configurability of the camera module is highly superior to a standard USB webcam.” At around $30 for an 8 megapixel sensor, the RPi camera isn’t going to break the bank, and it’s well supported ecosystem-wise. But there’s still that one-camera-per-board limitation.

One solution comes in the form of the IVPort V2 Raspberry Pi Camera Muliplexer. This device lets you switch between up to four Raspberry Pi V2 cameras with a single board, using 3 GPIO pins for control. You can also use several of these boards together with additional GPIO pins for up to 16 cameras feeding to one Pi. There’s also a less expensive dual version if you only need to use two cameras; this one only requires a single GPIO pin for operation.

As seen in the video below, if you’re using two of these in a stereoscopic arrangement, the left and right camera will only be off by a few hundredths of a second. While this will restrict some applications, for something like a multi-camera security feed where the exact time isn’t critical, it should be very useful. You can find more info on the setup at their GitHub repo.

Seller Canerdurmusoglu also offers a version compatible with the first RPi camera if you need or prefer that version.

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The Flame Trench is a group of British and American students and professionals interested in model rocketry. While their portfolio certainly includes the rockets that you might have launched as a kid, some of their exploits involve rockets taller than a human, attempts to break altitude records, and even thrust vectoring via BPS Space with the end-goal of landing a model rocket vertically under power. You know, the kind of stuff SpaceX has been doing so successfully these days.

I got to catch up with member Ben Cartwright, who in addition to his experiments, operates a new Flame Trench Tindie store. Items for sale there include stickers for marking the center (or centre as he resides in the UK) of gravity and pressure for your model aeronautical equipment, as well as disk-shaped electronics prototyping platforms meant to fit inside the cones of model rockets.

As with many of us, Ben has always been interested in electronics in some respect. His dad started him off with model planes and helicopters as a young child, and since then the magic of invisibly moving electrons about to do his bidding had him hooked. After quite a bit of study, and discovering his love of space and rocketry along the way, he’s about to get a Master’s degree in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science. After that, he has a job lined up at RAL Space (the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) upon graduation.

The Flame Trench Organization was looking at building hardware and kits to sell for the model rocketry community in the UK. Tindie was a perfect platform for selling this type of product. While their product offerings are currently limited to what’s seen below, they’ve got several exciting projects in the works, including flight computers, rocket altimeters, image sensors, and more.

Ben Cartwright and the Flame Trench are quite new to Tindie, having just opened in Mid-March of this year, but Ben describes it as “super simple to use,” and notes that the “quality of the content on there is fantastic!” Having listed a few things here myself, I’d wholeheartedly agree with it being easy to use. If you’ve ever written a blog post on WordPress, or put a project on Hackaday.io or similar, listing a product here is equally simple.

He does note that there’s currently not a lot on Tindie from the model rocketry community, but he hopes to change that. We’re looking forward to it, and invite anyone else who has a rocketry related gadget to sell to get it into a Tindie store of their own.

It’s always fun to get together (whether virtually or in real life) with those who share common interests, and swapping ideas could even save you from having to reinvent the wheel solid rocket engine! For a preview of the kind of projects that Flame Trench members take on, check out the BPSspace promo video below:

For another take on high altitude experimentation, you might also check out the CatSat1. While high altitude ballooning might not have the same kind of high speed excitement as model rocketry, getting a glimpse of the earth from far above using your own equipment has to be amazing as well.

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Last year’s Easter Egg Hunt by RC2014 creator semachthemonkey was a massive success, and this year they’ve pulled in friends to make it bigger, better and eggier than before!

The Easter Bunny is busy hiding the parts of a discount code among many RC2014 products on Tindie. If you can find all the parts of the code this Sunday, you can use it to get an 18% discount on RC2014 computers and accessories from semachthemonkey, Ed Brindley, Tynemouth Software or Dtronixs through Monday.

What is RC2014?

RC2014 is a simple 8-bit Z80 based modular computer originally built to run Microsoft BASIC. It is inspired by the home built computers of the late 70s and computer revolution of the early 80s.

RC2014 Modules in full glory.

Anyone with basic soldering skills can build one, so it’s great for beginners and a wonderful introduction for anyone interested in Retro Computing. The build is well documented on RC2014.co.uk and there’s a strong community behind it.

It’s modular, customizable, and Open Source, so folk are constantly developing new modules to extend it. One of the latest releases is the ESP8266 Wifi Module shown below.

So hop to it to get the RC2014 set-up of your dreams at a fantastic price. We hope you have an awesome chocolate filled weekend!

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While there were other games that came before it, Pac-Man is the game that cemented the image and feel of arcade games into our collective consciousness. At least that’s the way it seems to me… even if I much prefer Galaga.

If you do prefer Pac-Man, and would like to have it with you at all times in a satisfyingly small form factor. The OLEDiCADE from Pheonix Cnc, Oleduino hits both the video game nostalgia mark and one for custom electronics geeks like me! It can be played with one hand using the tiny joystick, and has a screen that’s only 56x28mm. Even with the small screen, Pac-Man (which scrolls up and down to display the entire maze) looks quite good. The device also features versions of Flappy Bird, Breakout, and even Octopus, giving you something to fiddle with when you need a quick distraction.

You can watch seller Hayri describe and play the game in the video below. He also shows off a 3D-printed case for it, which will be available sometime in the future.

For other tiny gaming options, you might also check out the impressive and versatile TinyPi, or even the Tiny Arcade cabinet—unquestionably the smallest video game that you can also see through. If you care to challenge me on my vintage arcade opinions facts, you can ping me @JeremySCook, or you can find Tindie at—you guessed it—@Tindie.

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