Tindie

Kits are a great way to practice your soldering skills, with the added bonus that the finished product does something interesting. Thanks to YouTube, anyone can go from zero to solder-ninja and thanks to sites like Tindie, there are a lot of great project designed to practice those skills. Let’s take a look at some of the electronics kits made by Tindie sellers.

Easy Joule Thief Kit:

Batteries don’t keep a constant voltage throughout their discharge cycle. This means that towards the end of a discharge, the voltage can drop too low to be useful in a particular circuit whilst there is still energy left in the battery. A joule thief is a simple voltage booster that will allow you to squeeze every last joule of energy left in a battery. The Easy Joule Thief kit made by Makersbox provides a great introduction to soldering and fits on a standard AA battery . Step by step documentation is provided for assembling the kit, and the PCB design files are provided should you want to roll your own board.

LED + Solar Power Soldering Kit:

This is a cool little kit because it uses interesting components, namely the solar cell and a 1F super-capacitor. Charging from solar power takes 15 minutes or 2 minutes from the USB port built into the board. This kit is designed to be worn as a necklace, meaning you can easily show off your mad soldering skills to your friends. “Whaddya mean your necklace doesn’t have a super-capacitor in it?! ”  The kit creator Lumen Electronic Jewelry has done a great job on build documentation so even if you’re totally new to this stuff you’ll be grand.

A funny shaped PCB and a microcontroller? We must be in kit heaven.  The SnapNsew board designed by Makersbox is designed to let you easily make a soft circuit project ( a circuit made with conductive thread and fabric). The idea behind this kit is great – you can test your circuit whilst the PCB is in one piece, then to create a soft circuit, simply snap off whichever part of the circuit you want and hook it back up to the main board via conductive thread. Amazing! On the board you get an Attiny 8-pin microcontroller, piezo speaker, LED, photo-transistor, and a touch sensitive button. 10 feet of conductive thread is also included. All documentation is provided over on Instructables with some examples of soft circuits that can be made with this ingenious little kit.

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Passwords are a necessary evil in today’s connected age. Even more annoying is that you really shouldn’t use the same password for all of the sites you log into, otherwise when one is compromised, all of them can potentially be hacked. Solutions such as writing them down on paper, or even some sort of algorithm based on the date and your mother’s maiden name might work, but ideally this would be done automatically.

There is software designed to do this for you, but what if it gets compromised? As explained in the following video, you’re back to square one. Perhaps being extremely cautious about your credentials isn’t that crazy of a notion.

To combat this possibility, the Mooltipass is an offline password keeper that operates separately from your computer. It needs both smartcard as well as a code to access. It runs only tested code, so a virus or malicious program can’t (in theory) compromise your passwords. Making it even cooler is that its development process was followed on Hackaday and the product is open source so you can check things out for yourself.

It’s a neat idea, and if you have a high regard for your password security, one of these devices can be had on Tindie for $170 plus shipping and handling. Certainly not cheap, but in some cases this is well worth it.

Finally, if you have no idea where the term “Mooltipass” comes from, then perhaps the following clip will refresh your memory. Apparently “Mool…” is how “Multipass” is pronounced if you sound the word out while having no frame of reference as to the phonetics of the English language.

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As someone who loves to make and experiment with all kind of devices, I hate to admit that I really don’t enjoy soldering. When done on circuit boards, the results can be good, but when done on bare, it’s both difficult and the results can be messy.

If you don’t enjoy this art form, then perhaps some research into whether breakout boards are available for your application is in order. Lots of places sell breakouts, but perhaps someone on Tindie has a solution exactly appropriate for your situation!

Nifteecircuits, for example, has an interesting selection of breakouts. Their D-Sub Male/Female breakout pictured above allows one to intercept signals passing through for analysis or other use. They also have a 3.5mm stereo jack breakout that should be useful in quite a few audio circumstances. Both of these applications could be cobbled together by a hobbyist, but why waste your time for something that looks messy, when you can simply buy it?

Looking at other breakouts available on Tindie, this power supply (or supply breakout and voltage switch) for a breadboard, is described as “adorable and efficient.” As shown above, it doesn’t block central pins on a breadboard, which can certainly be beneficial. Finally, if you’re making music in a non-traditional way, this MIDI breakout should help you interface a microcontroller or other electronics into your digital audio setup.

Lots of choices available breakout-wise. So if you don’t like to solder, make sure to search through Tindie for ready-made breakout solutions!

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We now live in an era where complex electronics can be dwarfed by their power supply. This is illustrated, in this case, by an WiFi-enabled ESP8285 chip which has been mounted on a tiny printed circuit board. It is designed to be connected and mounted to a 9-volt battery.

The board is set up to monitor environmental conditions including temperature, pressure, humidity, and ambient light. According to creator Pesky Products (which sells other interesting gadgets on Tindie as well) they can be conveniently placed on top of door thresholds to monitor conditions in a room.

Making this board even more interesting is that it has several general purpose input output (GPIO) pins that you can use to expand its sensing capabilities, or perhaps even add output functionality.

Although an incredible board, one thing that might limit some uses is the fact that it only lasts around 60 hours while powered by 9-volt battery. Possibly offsetting this, however, is the fact that it can go into “deep sleep” mode, saving power for when you really need it. The board’s creator is still experimenting with power-saving strategies; perhaps this time limit can be pushed out significantly in the future!

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This tiny puck is so jam-packed with features, a bullet point list is the only way to give you a rundown or else we will quite literally be here all day. A Kickstarter campaign is currently underway and at the time of writing it has reached nearly five times its goal of £20,000. There’s only three days left to back the project if you want to get your hands on one as soon as possible! It’s from Gordon Williams, a Tindie seller with some excellent hardware in his store. We can’t wait to see the puck there someday too.

In this tiny puck you get:

• Bluetooth Low Energy version 5.0 which gives 80M range in open space.
• You can write Javascript code in a browser and have it update on the device in real-time. No special software is required. Imagine how much easier this will make debugging!
• It’s got a boat load of sensors — light, temperature, magnetism, capacitance, and a tactile switch that turns the puck itself into a button.
• Still not satisfied with the amount of sensors? There are 6 GPIOs broken out to 0.1″ pins. This also gives you access to a 12 bit ADC, SPI, I2C and UART.
• You can control the puck from a browser or from an app on your phone. Pair this with the 6 GPIO pins and you could make a robot or any of about a million other things.
• The puck can be configured as a slave if you want to control it externally or alternatively it can act as a master. In master mode it can appear as a Bluetooth HID device meaning it can act as a keyboard or a mouse without having to install drivers on your PC.
• The puck runs Espruino, a JavaScript interpreter for micro-controllers. Espruino has TCP/IP and HTTP magic built-in so you can connect your puck to the Internet via Bluetooth.
• It’s all open source. You can check out the latest design revisions over on GitHub.

That’s the quick and dirty rundown of what this ingenious little puck has to offer. For a complete list of its features and example applications, check out the Kickstarter campaign linked at the top. The video is particularly interesting as it shows some really interesting things you can do with it. If you miss out on the Kickstarter campaign, you’ll see this puck on Tindie once all of the backers have received their pucks but why wait that long?

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Electromagnetic Field is a camping festival for makers, builders, hackers, artists, and Engineers alike. If you were to draw a Venn diagram of people interested in Tindie and people going to EMF, it would probably just be a circle.

Both Tindie and Hackaday writers will be at the event and we want to invite you to a show and tell happy hour on Friday at the OxHack main tent. It’s going to run from 6-8pm and we are interested in seeing absolutely any and all projects you’ve been working on. If you are a Hackaday Prize entrant, have a project up on Hackaday.io or have a product up on Tindie, we would jump at the chance to see it in the flesh. Of course we will have some Tindie/Hackaday swag to give away and some snacks.

Once again thats 6-8pm, Friday, OxHack main tent. Brink a hack and have a snack. Be there or be square!

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Knowing your power usage is incredibly useful information when it comes to implementing energy saving measures. With the Internet of Things slowly but surely finding its way into every possible gadget, your electricity bill will drop as the house you live in gets smarter. The day of the smart home is still a pipe dream for the average consumer but the fact you are reading this Tindie blog means you don’t have to wait! For the next few years ‘Smart’ homes will consist of engineers cramming sensors all over the house and hooking them up to a WiFi or Bluetooth radio. Followed by bragging to anyone that will listen about how hi-tech their house is.

Now that you’re filled in on the smart home situation, let’s take a look at the NodeMCU energy monitor board made by Whatnick Inc. NodeMCU is open-source firmware that runs on the ESP8266 WiFi chip. It allows you to program the ESP8266 using the LUA programming language, which is easy to get started with. There are a boatload of examples over on the NodeMCU website to get you going. All of this combined with the ADS1115 Analog to Digital converter from Texas Instruments gives you an Internet connected mains power monitor.

Power usage is calculated by multiplying current times voltage, so you must sample both of them at the same time. This board comes with a clip-on current transducer for measuring current and an isolation transformer for sampling voltage. The obvious advantage of buying a pre-designed PCB is you reduce the risk of making a mistake and letting mains voltage get somewhere it shouldn’t. Like your heart for example.

Whatnick Inc has some great example usage over on the documentation page. Using the ESP8266 it is a couple lines of LUA code to send your mains power usage over to ThingSpeak for graphing.

Power graph on Thingspeak

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If you want to turn a light on at a certain time every night, then a simple mechanical timer from your preferred hardware or general merchandise store is probably a good choice. If, however, you need extremely detailed control over when and how long to trigger a light, bell, production line equipment, or really anything you need to switch at a set interval, then the Tick Tock Timer by 8Bit Automation is what you want.

Timing patterns, as seen in the video below, can be set via a built-in touch screen. Up to 20 scheduled events can be set up, along with 5 holiday periods where the relay does not come on. It can also be actuated manually, and response to this input can be customized. If that wasn’t enough, it has a security feature that allows for three levels of access.

The housing is 3D-printed, and comes in red, grey, or blue. Though this might seem nice from an aesthetics point of view, I could also see this being important if you want to color coordinate several of these switches for easy access.

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As a kid, you probably played a game called “Connect Four,” where you drop your colored cylinder into a slot with the goal of connecting four pieces. This “Four in a Row” game is played in much the same way, with one big difference. Neither side’s pieces are colored, but are instead clear acrylic disks.

As shown in the video below, once a disk is dropped into a slot, the game recognizes this and lights it up in your color. It’s programmed to recognize and highlight a win, and even allows you to reposition a disk if you make a mistake. If that weren’t enough, when the game is not being played, it acts as a customizable scrolling text display.

[vimeo 174857562 w=640 h=360]

As you probably know, this isn’t the only thing that can be made out of acrylic and RGB LEDs. The Est store also lists in “Interactive light effect tower,” which appears to be fun for all ages. The light pattern can be changed via three infrared sensors, and it can act as a three-dimensional audio view meter.

[vimeo 158636063 w=640 h=1137]

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Measuring pulse is a tricky business due to the low amplitude of the signals involved which are usually only a few milli-volts. Photoplethysmogram (PPG) is a method of detecting pulse which works using an IR LED and an IR photo-detector. IR light is shone into the skin and the amount reflected back changes as the blood pulses through the body.

The signal from the photo-detector needs to be amplified before it can be effectively sampled by an Analog to Digital Converter like the ones found in most micro-controllers. This is where the Easy Pulse Plugin steps in to save the day. It uses the MCP6004 Quad Op Amp made by Microchip for amplification. From reading the documentation page, it’s clear that a lot of work has gone into the circuit design to get the cleanest possible signal out. The board is also Arduino compatible, designed to plug directly into an Arduino’s header pins. It can also be plugged into a breadboard for use with whatever microcontroller you work with.

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