Tindie

Imagine a large bristlebot supported by configurable pens, and you have some idea of what the “DancingDoodler” is. Using its vibrating motor, it scoots around on paper, leaving a colorful trail.

The device is meant to help expose young kids to electronics, and can be built by 4 year-olds with the help of an adult, or ages 5-11 on their own. I’d have to assume those 12 and up can also build them, and as the product’s description puts it, “It is also fun for grown ups that are in good relations with their inner child.” Let’s be honest, if you’re reading the Tindie blog, at least some part of that creative spark is still alive!

The patterns may seem random, but are affected by several factors, such as how it’s assembled, so changing the movement characteristics could be a fun game/challenge for older kids. Although not explicitly stated, per the video below, if you buy enough of these and a lot of paper, you can create a human/DancingDoodler pen arena to both entertain and confuse your young child. Whatever he’s thinking, it makes for a fun video with the dramatic symphony music in the background!

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I know that all Tindie Blog readers meticulously calculate the type of resistors needed for a project, so this may not apply to you. If, however, you have any friends that sometimes have to fiddle around with the right resistors for a project, you might tell them about the RBOX. This clever device allows you to dial in a resistance value from 0 to 9,999,999 Ohms in  single-Ohm steps, meaning that your friend can find exactly the right resistor value for a situation without plugging in and pulling individual components, or even remembering color codes.

Besides prototyping, a great application for this box could be for education, showing students the effect of changing resistances in certain applications.

Red Rocket Labs also offers similarly designed capacitor decade box available for capacitance ranges of between 100pF and 9.9999uF, and an RBOX PRO with a few upgraded features.

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This is an ingenious little tool that will come in especially handy if you make your own PCBs and want to keep them small and slim. Ever made a tiny PCB only to have the programming header pins sticking out way above the rest of the board? This USB to UART programmer with pogo pins will do away with all of that while also letting you program your boards in the blink of an eye. You could of course put some other type of programming header on your board, but this way is easier, and much faster if you have 20 or 200 boards to program.

The creator of this little adapter is called Phoenic CNC, and they also make the OLEDiUNO  range of products. They are little cubes with OLED screens on the front. The cubes are made from layers of PCBs with each OLEDiUNO containing a different type of sensor. You can get GPS, Tachometer, Spectrum Analyser, Gear indicator for cars/motorcycles and so on.

You can see the pogo pin adapter being used to program some OLEDiUNO boards in the video below. It’s a really handy tool to have especially if you hate using header pins for programming your boards.

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Finding out your exact location when outside is a relatively simple thing to do these days thanks to several GPS satellites orbiting the earth. Knowing your position relative to your surroundings whilst indoors is actually a more challenging problem for the end user because there isn’t an existing framework like GPS you can just tap into and get your coordinates.

The Localino uses as a chip made by decaWave, a semiconductor company that develops ICs for use in indoor positioning systems. The exact type of chip used in the Localino isn’t mentioned in the Tindie description but it is likely the DW1000 IC. This is an impressive chip that boasts location of objects to a precision of 10cm whilst moving at up to 5m/s. Due to the short packet duration used, this chip can handle 11,000 tags in a 20m radius. That isn’t a typo, eleven thousand tags in about 1,200 square meters. This raises the question, could you physically fit that many tags in that space? It is really impressive regardless!

For around $200 you can build DIY kits like the Localino which include three ‘anchors’ and one ‘tag’. Obviously, the anchors don’t move, they are used only to localize the position of the tags. Check out the YouTube video below showing the Localino in action. The results are very promising and open up a whole host of possibilities for mapping and tracking related projects.

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If you didn’t go to the Hackaday SuperConference in Pasadena, California back in November, you missed out on a lot — but you also didn’t get one of these awesome hardware badges. Now you can buy one on Tindie! In the video below, Hackaday’s (and Tindie’s) Mike Szczys explains what it is and what it’s good for.

As you can see from the photo above, it has four buttons, and an LED matrix display. What’s not quite as obvious is that it is capable of 2-way infrared communication, has a 3-axis accelerometer, and can play Tetris if you just want relatively mindless fun. The whole thing is meant to be hacked and reprogrammed, and even includes a header on the back which you can use to attach outside peripherals. See just after 3:00 in the video below for an idea from one of the creators of the badge, Voja Antonic).

The video gives a good introduction as to what the badge is all about. If, however, you’d like to drill down into the guts of it even further, you can find more of its origin story on (where else?) Hackaday.com, and procure the design files on Hackaday.io. Chris Gammell also wrote an article about the process of manufacturing them if you’d like to know more about that aspect of the project.

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Perhaps you’re a big fan of lightning, but have never been able to photograph the phenomenon. Obviously there is a challenge of setting up the exposure and other elements to take a good picture when the sky is otherwise dark, but the other huge challenge is timing when lightning is going to strike.

Perhaps you could just take a bunch of photos, but for a more refined experience, be sure to check out Xgknx’s lightning camera trigger. All you have to do is set the sensitivity via a potentiometer, then plug it in to your camera like an intervaolmeter. If your camera is set correctly, it will do the rest. Note that it comes with a 3.5mm jack to plug into a camera, but depending on your setup, it may require an adapter.

If this has piqued your curiosity, but isn’t exactly what you need, the Xgknx Store has several other camera trigger devices that may be what you’re (now) looking for!

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Given that this is Tindie, I don’t really need to explain why Raspberry Pi computers are great. On the other hand, if you order one, you get a board without a case, making it unsuitable as-is for many applications. You can, of course make your own, but if you’d instead like to buy a case, I have yet to see another offering as nice as this aluminum model from Mechatronics Art.

This case, which is compatible with the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3, comes anodized in several colors that you can choose from. It has accommodations for GPIO pin access, as well as mounting points for a Raspberry Pi camera. It has access to the ‘Pi’s ports, as well as a built-in reset button, as shown in the rendering below.

If all of that wasn’t enough, the description also says that the aluminum body acts as a passive heat sink to help improve the board’s performance. On the other hand, this kind of quality does come at a price, $49.99 as of this writing. Still, I imagine it would look great sitting on a desk or entertainment center!

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Thermal imaging sensors can easily run into the hundreds if not thousands of dollars for really high end sensors. If you are looking to do some basic thermal imaging on the cheap, you may want to consider the MLX90621 IR sensor made by Melexis. It currently costs around 45 USD from Digikey for a single unit. For that relatively low price you get some pretty decent specs that would be more than good enough for a lot of basic thermal imaging projects.

The IR array is arranged in a 16×4 pixel format so you get a vertical or horizontal strip of temperature data depending on sensor orientation. The sensor itself has a 0.5-512Hz programmable refresh rate and can measure object temperatures from -20 to 300 degrees Celsius. The field of view on this sensor is 30°x120° but it is also available in 60°x15° and 40°x10° versions.

Tindie seller Pesky Products sells a breakout board for this sensor which takes care of the low-dropout voltage regulator and some necessary pull-up resistors. All you have to do is solder the sensor to the board and you are good to go. There is also a Raspberry Pi based thermal imaging project that uses the MLX90621 sensor over on Hackaday.io. The build log contains some handy tips on hooking up the MLX sensor to a Pi.

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In today’s ultra-connected world, for many applications, automotive or otherwise, if there is data that needs to be processed, many times there is an app or piece of software to decode it, shielding you from “scary” raw data. On the other hand to some people like myself (and I suspect many Tindie customers) would rather have this data in a less processed form at times.

If you would like this from a CAN Bus-based system, this logger from Alex Borisevich may be exactly what you need. Though there are other applications for this beautifully simple protocol, the OBD-II diagnostic port on most vehicles driving today is likely the most well-known. Generally, to use this port, you would hook a cheap diagnostic computer up to it if you’re having a car issue. With this logger, however, you can log many conditions over a period of time, stored on a Micro SD card as a comma separated text file.

If you’re a “car person,” it would seem that the applications for something like this are quite interesting! On the other hand, with this device, you’ll need to translate the file into usable information. So if you just want to see why your car won’t start, this may not be the most efficient solution. But it will empower you to reverse engineer the user controls in your vehicle and add in your own hardware to react based on those packets. Want to build your own custom instrument cluster? This is a good place to start the research for that as well.

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You’ve probably seen various consoles and portable gaming devices based on an Arduino or Raspberry Pi, but making one yourself would likely be a challenge. Not impossible by any means, but getting the buttons, speaker, and display together to properly interact with it takes quite a bit of planning.

Now there is a ready-made option (or rather ready to solder option) in the “Gamby” shield. This device comes as a kit with a limited edition board and the components you’ll need to build it, including a 96×64 pixel monochrome LCD display, as well as four buttons, a tiny joystick and a speaker. An Arduino interacts with it via three modes varying in complexity, from fully interactive graphics, to controlling blocks, to simple text output.

You can see this setup running “Dungeons,” a simple RPG in the video below:

If you need more info on this board, check out GAMBY’s main site.

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