Tindie

The Raspberry Pi computer has certainly been a huge step in the maker/hacker/hobby electronics world with some very impressive capabilities. One thing it doesn’t have, however, is a way to directly input analog signals, or a few other functions that the Data Acquistion and Control (DAAC) Hat from Adaptive Industries supplies.

In addition to analog inputs, this board includes PWM, analog, and relay output signals. The board comes with a software dashboard that allows you to use the DAAC-Hat “as soon as it is connected,” according to the product’s page.

The board connects to a Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 with a 40-pin passthrough connector, and communicates via a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI). The board requires no external power, and still allows you access to all of your ‘Pi’s GPIO pins that aren’t used for SPI communication.

The “Hat” model is meant for the Raspberry Pi, but if you want to connect to another microcontroller, such as your favorite flavor of Arduino, check out the DAAC-100 for a very similar non-platform specific version. You can find even more information on these boards at the Adaptive Interfaces homepage.

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Arduino boards are great for making lights blink or controlling motors, but if you want to show output from it on a monitor, this task can be tricky. To make things less tricky, the NovaVGA Arduino VGA shield allows you to control a VGA monitor with only three pins acting as a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI).

In use, this board takes commands from an Arduino (or any SPI-compatible microcontroller) in a 160×120 resolution. It then converts it to a 640×480 resolution that should be understood by nearly any monitor you find to use. To help you get started programming (or if you just want to enjoy a casual game), seller Micronova has an Arduino library available, and includes examples including a color palette, a Mandlebrot set visualization, Tetris, and a text console.

One interesting thing to note about this board is that it appears to use an R-2R resistor ladder  to accomplish digital to analog conversion (note the series of resistors next to the actual port). You can read an explanation of this technique on Wikipedia, or there’s a more “hands-on” approach to VGA output using a series of resistors on Hackaday.io for another use example.

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Here’s an interesting technical problem of which I wasn’t really aware. Those of you that regularly tow a trailer, though are probably quite familiar with this, the issue of braking and trying to use a turn signal at the same time. Creator Kevin H. Patterson sums it up this way:

Most basic trailers have a 4-wire connector with only 3 signals: Running (aka Tail) Lights, Left Turn, and Right Turn. The trailer does not have a separate circuit for Brake lights; applying the Brake is supposed to light up both the Left and Right Turn signals together.

This may not sound like a big deal, but if you’re braking and turning, this means that the brake/turn lights are continuously held on, giving no indication of where you’re actually going. Another issue, though perhaps not as serious, is that the diodes normally used to hook the trailer up to the vehicle’s brake system also reportedly dissipate a lot of heat.

Patterson’s system, per his description, “uses XOR gates to intelligently combine the brake and turn signals.” What this means is that when you apply the brakes without a signal, things work normally. If, however, a turn signal blinks on with the brake applied, the corresponding turn/brake signal goes out, telling the vehicle behind you your intentions.

It’s a neat potential solution to a problem that I didn’t even know existed. On the other hand, be sure to check out the legal disclaimer on the bottom of the linked page and consider whether it’s legal and/or safe in your particular situation.

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If you want to amplify audio from your device (like an iPod or smartphone), plugging it into the “AUX” jack of a nearby radio is probably the easiest way. Actually visualizing the waveform that you’re listening to is a little more difficult.

You could hack something together, but the Pretty Happy amplifier (PHAP) is available to do this job in kit form. It takes input from a standard 3.5mm audio jack, then amplifies it to a maximum output of 15 watts on each channel. This signal is then displayed on a tiny OLED display.

Although you could perhaps integrate it into an existing audio system, the board seems to be begging to be put in a see-through enclosure for all the world to see. Making it even more interesting, is that the OLED is controlled by an ATmega328p microcontroller, so if you’d like it to display something other than the oscilloscope or indicators that it comes with, you can modify it as needed.

You can see even more information about this board on its Hackaday.io project page.

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Gordon William’s “Espruino Puck.js” product has sold over 100 units just on Tindie in the first two days. I got to catch up with him via email to talk about what his new product is all about, and what has made this product such an instantaneous success.

First things first thought, you probably want to know is what the Espruino Puck.js is, and what inspired Williams to actually make it. According to him:

When I’m talking to people about Espruino I often hear them say that they’d love to get started with microcontrollers, but they don’t know where to start with hardware. I really wanted to make a non-scary embedded device that could be made to do fun things without any knowledge of hardware – and hopefully Puck.js does that, while also having IO pins available so that you can wire it up to things if and when you want to.

Having a JavaScript interpreter with Bluetooth LE means that you can program (and debug) Puck.js completely wirelessly. For me, one of the big stumbling blocks with Bluetooth LE was that you had to write a phone app to do anything useful, but with Web Bluetooth that’s no longer the case – you can now control Bluetooth LE devices from a simple website. With the nRF52 chips from Nordic having more that enough power and RAM to run a language interpreter it just seemed like a perfect time to do something like this.

Tindie is nice and easy, and because Tindie hold the payment for you until you ship, it’s more friendly for customers – if you’re like me, it might be 1 or 2 days before you get time to pack and ship devices. There’s also a really easy API, which means it only took me an hour to come up with something that printed invoices and address labels for each customer (if only this came built-in! 😉

However, Tindie is only in US dollars, and there’s no way of handling tax for different countries. Unfortunately for me in the UK this means I have to raise the price by 20% for everyone because I am unable to add the VAT I have to charge to only European customers. It makes my invoicing script a bit more exciting, and I’d be pretty sure it deters some people (as does the US-only currency).

If you’re selling from home (at least in the UK) you don’t need to charge tax though, and for people doing that Tindie would be pretty much perfect.

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As much attention as ‘hacking’ and ‘making’ get, sometimes it seems that it’s still a fairly tight community of people that make really awesome stuff. This was reinforced when I saw the “Keychainino,” an old-school gaming device meant to be put on a keychain, for sale on Tindie, a version of which I’ve gotten to try out.

Although I don’t usually get to use the products I talk about here, I can definitively say, it’s a pretty neat little device. As shipped it plays a very simple Arkanoid-like game (see the video below) where you try to keep the ball in play for as long as you can. The version on Tindie is significantly larger that what is seen in the video and comes as a through-hole solder kit, rather than an assembled unit.

The device is powered via the ubiquitous CR2032 battery. I received mine several months ago, and through that non-use it seems to still have a good charge. Although you can just play pong on it, the device runs on an ATtiny84 microcontroller, meaning it can also be reprogrammed to do whatever you like. Personally, I’d love to see someone modify one with an accelerometer, microphone, or other sensor in order to make it react to movement or other stimulus. Perhaps you could even control the Arkanoid paddle, AKA ‘Vaus,’ this way.

Shown below is the surface-mount version, however the functionality of the larger model should be the same.

My original review of this device can be found here on my personal blog.

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If you use an Arduino or similar development board, chances are it comes with some sort of USB connection that you can just plug into and program via your computer. If, however, you’ve moved on to systems that need to be programmed using a separate in-system programmer (ISP or ICSP for in-circuit serial programmer), you’ll need to connect to solder pads on the board you’re using.

Or you could use pogo pins to do the job, allowing you to literally hold the connectors on your board. You could make this fixture yourself, or you could just buy one from Tindie. Seller FemToCow has one available here for 10 bucks ($9.99 plus shipping), which looks pretty good from the picture. And that’s all I can really tell you about the quality of this device.

On the other hand, the Mad Electron Engineering YouTube channel decided to do a review of it starting at 4:00 in the video seen below. It’s an interesting piece, going over why you might need one of these, and the fact that you can make one yourself that likely won’t be as good. Although the presenter is clear that he wasn’t paid to do an endorsement, at the end of the video he does say, “Thank you very much, I love it, it’s great.”

One couldn’t ask for a better review than that, and hopefully the video will help others see the benefit of this little guy. We love finding Tindie product reviews in the wild and hope to see more in the future!

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Aiming in video games is generally done by placing your mouse cursor, or perhaps the nose of your virtual vehicle on a target. This is obvious enough, but what if you want to look around without changing the direction in which you’re aiming? When the game supports it, this is usually done with some keyboard or mouse input, which certainly isn’t as natural as just turning your head.

If, however, you’d like to head-control your gaming view, the TrackIMU offers an interesting solution in the form of a small inertial sensor that can be attached to the top of a gaming headset. With this measurement unit and an onboard Arduino Pro Micro, it then feeds the position of your head into a computer, which can be used as a gaming input. You can see an example of what this means in the video below:

The product description mentions that this could be useful for many other applications, even if you don’t play video games, with application such as robotics and drones. Beyond that, I could see something like this used as an interface for CAD modelling, or with a head-mounted projector for an unconventional VR setup!

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Arduino boards, be they the ubiquitous Uno, or the more capable “Mega,” are great starting points for making fun DIY projects. Depending on your needs, however, in many cases they include things that are nice, but not always necessary.

The Naked Mega by Fuzzystudio gets rid of these frills in a package roughly an inch and a half square (38.1mm) that contains an ATmega2560 chip, as well as solder points for all 70 of a traditional Arduino Mega’s IO pins. This includes 54 digital pins and 16 analog, all of which work together to form the “FUZZY” display seen below.

If you’re wondering (like I was) if all of those LEDs are controlled directly by the Naked Mega without any sort of external controller, the answer is yes. This is explained in step 9 of this instructables article about the development process for the product.

The price seems good at $14.50 plus shipping as of this writing, though the small form factor does leave a few tradeoffs. Obviously traditional Arduino shields won’t work with this little guy, and you’ll need a USB to TTL serial converter module to program it. As it just so happens, the Fuzzy store sells this, so you can add it as an option, or head to its dedicated page to check it out further.

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This quad band GSM board is claimed to be the worlds smallest of its kind. We have no way to verify this bold claim but let’s all agree that this is a pretty small board that lets you send texts and make calls. The GSM feature is an addition to the OLEDiUNO Cube range that we have mentioned previously on the blog.

The idea is each OLEDiUNO board has an OLED display and uses an Arduino compatible microcontroller to make programming nice and simple. Some other examples of the OLEDiUNO projects include displaying GPS co-ordinates, displaying Tachometer data, or a spectrum analyser. GSM is a nice addition to the range and will open up some cool project possibilities for people that want a display, a GSM module, and the option of battery power all in the one easily programmable package.

To get an idea of some of the features this board has, check out the video below. You can also appreciate how small this board is sitting in Phoenic CNC’s hands. There is also the possibility that he has giant hands giving the illusion of a small board but we’ll let you decide that one.

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