Tindie

Like most of us, you need to keep track of time. There are many ways to do this, from traditional dial clocks, to digital clocks (or phones), to all kinds of iterations in between. It seems that makers never give up on the idea of new and interesting clock designs, so here’s a new one that combines digital and analog in an interesting way.

Instead of using LEDs to form a rough set of numbers, or perhaps some sort of binary display, 180 LEDs are used to display the time, 60 for seconds, another 60 for minutes, and a third set of 60 for hours (that increment every 12 minutes). The design, which was originally Robert Gill’s senior electrical engineering project, manages to control these, along with “PM,” and “Alarm” LEDs, using an 18-pin microcontroller. The project went so well he kept it going and now offers it as a product in his Tindie store.

The clock keeps accurate time using the 50 or 60 Hz sine wave that comes from the power grid, not an RTC or other means that you might suspect. Although not a common method in today’s technology, it’s a trick as old as (electronic) time which is explained in this Hackaday blurb.

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So, as you might have heard, Tindie recently hit product listing #10,000, which is awesome. On the other hand, what is actually being sold here? Well, I’m glad you asked, because here are the top five products by the number of sales in the last 12 months!

#5 Mooltipass Mini Offline Password Keeper

So you visit websites that need a password. Sure, you could use the same password for every site, but then if one is compromised, your other data is now at risk. For something that combines offline security with the ability to automatically enter passwords, the Mooltipass Mini connects to your computer or smart device, and features a removable smart card for data storage.

#4 RN2483 Breakout (Bare Board)

If you’d like to work with LoRaWAN, this board will help you break out the RN2483 and RN2903 LoRa transceivers from Microchip. All of the GPIO pins are available, as well as serial pins for your hacking needs!

#3 Pi Camera HDMI Cable Extension

The Raspberry Pi camera is useful for many things, however, if you want to use it away from the Pi itself, the ribbon cable used makes things difficult. This camera extension adapts the standard ribbon cable to HDMI use, allowing it to be positioned well away from your processor.

#2 I2C Soil Moisture Sensor

Does being a good hacker and gardener generally go together? Anecdotally, I’ll say “no,” however, I don’t think it’s a matter of not knowing what to do, it’s more a matter of procrastination. Apparently I’m not the only one that feels this way, as this soil moisture/light/temperature sensor has sold over 5000 units!

#1 I Can Solder Badge v1

And finally, for the #1 item on Tindie, may I present the I Can Solder badge. The kit that includes the components needed (not including the iron or solder) to solder an LED light to a coin cell battery into a badge. Given that over 7000 of these badges have been ordered, it seems there’s a huge market for educational/STEM products!

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Since you’re browsing the Tindie blog, we’ll go ahead and assume that you know something about electronics. On the other hand, if you need learning resources “for a friend” or family member, there is a huge amount available online. One such resource is the AddOhms “electronics tutorials for everyone” YouTube channel.

These videos are made by James Lewis, “The Bald Engineer”. Check out the trailer below and you’ll see they’re target audience is non-engineers that want to learn about electronics. It’s truly amazing what kind of learning resources we now have at the tip of our fingers, available for free… Or at the cost of an Internet subscription and likely your privacy, if you’re in the mood to split hairs.

If, for whatever reason, the YouTube/online viewing method doesn’t fit your needs, Lewis has made a set of his tutorials available on DVD. This would be an ideal format for a classroom environment, and the Extras DVD with alternate footage, tutorials, and behind the scenes content makes it even more appealing!

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If you come from a manufacturing environment, you’re likely familiar with PLCs — programmable logic controllers. Without going through the relative merits of this type of control system, one thing you will likely miss when working with Arduino and other development boards are the LEDs that light up when an output goes high. This gives you some indication that, yes, you are getting power to that relay (or other component) and you’ll need to wade through a jumble of ill-labeled wires with a voltmeter in order to kludge together a solution for your malfunctioning machinery.

Or perhaps your company features well laid-out machine control panels. Either way, these quick-reference lights can be extremely useful.

If you’d like to add this functionality to your Arduino board, the “LED Diodes Debugger Shield for Arduino” from Owl Labs is an interesting solution. It simply plugs into the I/O female header pins on one side of an Arduino UNO, and allows signals to pass through its own headers while lighting up to indicate what is HIGH and LOW.

It’s a great idea, and something that could even be an interesting concept to apply directly on a custom UNO-style board. Besides diagnostics, if you’d like to do a Knight Rider or Cylon lighting pattern, this would make things extremely easy!

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If you have a Raspberry Pi and want to connect accessories, there’s an array of GPIO pins that you can plug into on the side. Unfortunately, if you need them to stay securely in place, your options are limited. An IDC connector/ribbon cable is one option, but then those wires need to be secured somehow. If there were only a solution that could be tightened down to securely bind wires to each pin as needed…

Well I’m happy to inform you that there is a product that lets you do this — the Pi-EzConnect. This device plugs into your RPi as a HAT, and allows access to all of the Rasbperry Pi’s GPIO pins with glorious screw terminals! If you need to solder a few components for your design, there’s even a breadboarding area built into the middle of this device.

If the RPi Zero is more your style, Alchemy Power Inc. also has a solution with their Pi-Zero-EzConnect. Though slightly more limited due to its small size, it still comes with one row of the 40-pin header broken out as screw terminals, and more can be added as needed (two 2-wire screw terminals are included). Both styles have their own set of 40-pin headers, which can be used to connect HATs, or even a ribbon cable if needed.

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Buttons are fine for most projects — such as typing a blog post — but it’s hard to beat rotary inputs for some applications. Volume adjustment, or quickly changing the position of a CNC cutter come to mind, but there are all kinds of applications for this type of device that could be implemented. The question is, do you want to use an encoder or potentiometer? Let’s check out a few of the differences.

Potentiometers

Potentiometer in Breadboard by Kszapsza via Wikimedia Commons CC-ASA 4.0I (cropped)

Potentiometers work by changing a circuit’s resistance value as the knob is turned. The advantage of this component is that it is easily read by a microcontroller’s analog input, or can even control the speed of motors or intensity of lights directly. An important disadvantage of this component is the fact that you are limited to less than one turn of the dial to indicate the full range of input possibilities.

Encoders

Rotary encoders, though similar to potentiometers from the outside, work in a much different way. Instead of measuring resistance, they send signals to a microcontroller as they are turned, timed in such a way that the direction and speed — through the sequence of pulses detected — can be determined. The advantages of this component include precision, due to the binary nature of these pulses, and the fact that you can spin the knob more than a single turn.

On the other hand, setting one of these up is quite a bit more complicated, and requires some processing power to make sure you don’t skip steps. They can also be more expensive, especially if one has lots of steps per revolution.

A Big Rotary Encoder

If you would like to use an encoder in your project, this Big Rotary Encoder from Zachtek looks quite interesting. The assembly comes in a 600 or even 2000 pulses per revolution versions, and outputs position signals over I2C or UART via an onboard Arduino Pro Mini, meaning you don’t have to deal with pulses directly. It also features a ball bearing to help it spin, which would make it a great candidate for a custom MAME setup. Did someone say “Arkanoid?” “Tempest?”

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Way back on June 26^th, 2012 Tindie launched as an outlet for small-run electronics and hardware. Last month we passed a major milestone; Tindie launched product number 10,000 on July 5th, 2017

During this march from 1 to 10,000 a vibrant community of Tindarians grew up around a wide range of technologies. You can get an overview of this in my What is Tindie Anyway? article from last month. We’ve seen many changes along the way, like the 2015 sale to Supplyframe, Hackaday’s parent company, as announced on Hackaday.com.

 Check in on our stats and you’ll see there are currently more than 5,400 active listings from Tindarians in over 130 countries. So, yes, Tindie is your worldwide hub for unique electronics and hardware projects!

So what’s the “lucky” product #10,000 you ask? That would be the CCS811 Air Quality Breakout board. The device measures total volatile organic compounds (TVOCs) in the air, and given its very small form factor and I²C communication capability, could make a good tool for environmental monitoring.

So a big thanks to everyone that sells and buys here. Obviously this site would be nothing without you, and we hope that we’re able to provide a great service for this unique and growing niche!

As always, if you have any feedback, be sure to ping the team on  Twitter @tindie!

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If you have an industrial background, you likely think of robotic arms as expensive and very tough mechanisms, somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 feet tall to much larger. On the other end of the spectrum, there have been robotic toys that are much cheaper, both in cost and build quality, for almost as long as actual robots. Now, though, with the advent of cheap microcontrollers and personal manufacturing, we’ve seen “toy” robots start to appear that are quite a bit better than what has come before, appropriate for educational purposes, or the serious hobbyist.

If you’re interesting in one of these not-quite-toys, “Pedro” can fit comfortably in the palm of your hand, and is available in a full 3D-printed kit, or as the control board only. It features four axes of control, including the end-of-arm tooling, and as shown in the video below, it can be programmed to pick and place objects in a repetitive motion, triggered by an onboard button.

The robot can be controlled via a GUI seen above, and since the control board uses an ATmega328P, it can be programmed via the Arduino IDE. Additionally, the control board includes four potentiometers, allowing an operator to move each axis manually.

More details can be found on Hackaday.io, or if you want to print this arm yourself, check out the files on Thingiverse.

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If you were going to point towards one thing that has powered the ability for hobbyists to make more and more interesting gadgets at home, development boards like those made by Arduino would come to mind. On the other hand, they need something to do, and programmable LEDs, commonly in strip form, often fill this role. Strips have been used in everything from blinking costumes, to indicators, to persistence of vision (POV) displays that trick your eyes into turning a moving image into something solid.

LED strips are quite flexible, making them great for adapting to your particular project, for instance if you need to stick them on the inside of a circular curve. On the other hand, flexibility isn’t always appropriate for a particular project, and sometimes you need them to stay in place. Or as Tindie seller Dnil puts it, “I love playing with addressable LED strips, but I found they were squirrely if I wanted something permanent.”

After considering this problem, he made a rigid exoskeleton to which an LED strip can be soldered. The strip and exoskeleton are simply tinned up, then heated through the exoskeleton’s through-hole pads to secure both in place. Power and data can be applied at the end, or via a second set of pads on the side, allowing rigid strips to be chained together in several orientations.

The exoskeletons feature M3 mounting holes, and because of how things are attached, the sticky side of the strips can still be used. This makes a great place to attach a small dev board, such as an Arduino Nano.

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As you may know, Tindie and both flavors of Hackaday fall under the same umbrella of enterprises, and many people browse/use all three in one way or another. So it should come as no surprise that several Hackaday Prize semifinalists for the Best Product award are also active Tindie sellers. I’ll walk through those below but you can also see all of the projects chosen here.

Orthrus

The first comes from Nick Sayer of Geppetto Electronics. His store includes a variety of interesting hardware devices, but his Hackaday Prize entry, an encryption system named Orthrus, is different from anything seen there. It is, as listed in its description,

a hardware mechanism to provide secure “two man control” over a data store. It is a USB microSD card reader, but it requires two cards. The data is striped in the style of RAID 0, but the data is also encrypted with a key that is stored in a key storage block on each card. In essence, each card is useless without the other. With possession of both cards, the data is available without restriction, but with only one, the remaining data is completely opaque.

In other words, it stores encrypted data onto microSD cards that act as both the data storage and the key. One is useless (or at least encrypted) without the other. It’s a great idea, and a very simple way to keep sensitive data secure.

PewPew FeatherWing

Keeping data secure is important, but if you simply need a little entertainment, or perhaps are looking for a good way to program in CircuitPython, Radomir Dopieralski of the Deshipu Store has a new idea with the PewPew FeatherWing project. According to its description,

As of yet, there is no game library and/or add-on that would allow to easily create games in CircuitPython. This project is an attempt to fix this.

[The project is a] shield for Adafruit Feather boards with buttons and an LED matrix display, for simple games.

Given it’s six tiny, colorful buttons, and a built-in LED screen, it looks like a great place to start FeatherWing hacking!

City Air Quality and Open Source IOT Platorm

While it’s impressive enough to have one top-twenty Hackaday Prize entry, Radu Motisan of the Radhoo Store, where you can actually buy his IoT platform entry right now, managed to place two projects in contention.

The first is the City Air Quality device, which, according to the description,

[Environmental] sensors will have to conquer more in the space of wearables but also be part of the places we live in, and that includes cities. This project will document an experimental setup to track pollution, ultimately turning to a device that can be used in cities, based on IOT topology.

His second product is an open source IoT platform, shown in the picture above. According to the description:

This is the KIT1, an Open Source IOT Dosimeter, that can be used both as a portable detector, but also as a monitoring station to upload readings over the internet. By default it uses a Geiger tube to detect radiation. When used as a portable detector, readings are displayed on the LCD. There is also a speaker that beeps on radiation events or is used to sound an alarm for higher readings.

More to Come!

While these look like interesting products, the contest hasn’t ended! Currently the Assistive Technologies round is ongoing until September 4th at 7:00 AM PDT, see the official rules here. On the other hand, if you have an idea that doesn’t necessarily fit into a neat category, the Anything Goes round runs from September 4th to October 16th. Why not get your entry in while you still have time!

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