Tindie

As a maker/hacker/tinkerer or whatever you call yourself, when you’re dealing with electronics projects, the focus is generally on getting it to work. Many times this is good enough, and you perhaps move on to something else, but if you actually want people to accept your device as useful in real life, a good cover is an excellent way to make things look “finished.”

I first noticed Wgb’s store via this micro breadboard enclosure. It’s a clever little device, sized for a 170-pin breadboard, with holes cut to fit a Spark Core microcontroller. The enclosures are priced at only $2.00, though shipping will run more than twice that price. On the other hand, Wgb lists the files needed to make it on Thingiverse, so you can print your own if you prefer.

If you check out the rest of this store, a few other electronics holders and enclosures are listed, as well as a few other “Tindie-appropriate” projects. The dead battery flip jar looks like fun, and it is set up so it can use “dead” double-A or triple-A batteries that are no longer producing useful voltage for your other electronics.

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Sometimes a project calls for true AC waveform generation, whether it be generating an audio signal or making a DIY arbitrary signal generator. This Power DAC board made by Visigence for the Arduino Uno has 12 bit resolution, 15V rail to rail supply and can supply 250mA of current making it suitable for the majority of hobby projects. Sending voltage values to the board from an Arduino is done over SPI which means you can stack up to four of these boards on a single Arduino and easily control each one individually. Visigence provides schematics for the shield should you want to modify the design and some example code over on their github page.

Lissajous figure on an oscilloscope – by Visigence

One of the many interesting projects possible with this board is generating Lissajous figures on an oscilloscope. Visgence has made an interesting blog post about drawing Lissajous figures  using this Power DAC shield. The basic idea behind these figures is you take two sine waves and feed them into an oscilloscope set to x-y mode. In x-y mode the scope will plot two input channels against one another. By varying the frequency and phase of each of the sine waves you can change the type of Lissajous figure that appears. Lissajous figures are better appreciated in video form. Check out this YouTube video which gives a great demonstration:

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Making an LED cube at home is pretty doable if you stick to 4x4x4 or 5x5x5, but making the leap to 8x8x8 presents a pretty big jump in complexity. Depending on the construction of the cube, it is way more difficult to find faults and fix them, especially if an LED right in the middle happens to blow. The jolliCube made by JolliFactory is a modular based design which makes it really easy to deconstruct the cube into 8×8 layers to replace any blown LEDs or troubleshoot any problems that arise.

Another cool feature of the cube is that it’s not tied to any particular microcontroller, the entire thing is controlled via SPI. The jolliCube’s driver board is a set of eight MAX7219 LED display drivers. Just hook up SPI to these boards, and a 5V power supply to get it up and running. Some example code is provided on the documentation page with very cool visual effects for your cube as well as build instructions. This looks like a fun kit to spend an afternoon putting together that will also look great in your house or office! Check out this video of the jolliCube in action:

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As the Gatling gun was envisioned as a tool to reduce the need and scale of future wars, perhaps creator David Dorhout thought that a rubber band gun capable of automatic fire would decrease the number of office pranks. Though I now work from home, I don’t see this being the case for normal offices, and my dog likely isn’t keen on me obtaining one.

These particular rubber band guns come as a kit. Though the larger parts must be 3D printed, a trigger button, motor, and everything else you need to put one together is included. Two models are available, the six-barreled “RBB-32,” or the larger “MB-32,” with twice the barrels, and capable of firing over 72 rubber bands before reloading. Reloading is simply a matter of changing rotary magazines, and after a few seconds, you’ll be ready to torture your cubicle-mates again with a smattering of rubber fury.

As the project’s description says, you’ll be able to “release a torrent of rubber bands like never before seen.” Print files for the smaller Rubber Band Blaster-32 can be found here, or you can step up to printing the Mini Blaster-32 for more mayhem. Check out the videos of both after the “Keep Reading” button!

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Though some people may be different, if you’re anything like me, you often get a sudden urge to build something cool. It could be a robot, blinking light, camera rig, or anything really, but most of the time these things aren’t useful. You simply want to see if you can do it, perhaps producing a video of it for the world to admire.

The question then becomes what to do with these now-disused parts. Some things can be made into another device, but sometimes you just need to clear out space for the next project or even a move. Throwing something away is the easiest option, but it’s wasteful, and contributes to ever-growing landfills.

Another option is to sell your great but unneeded tools and parts on the Tindie Flea market. To list something, log on to Tindie, list your “product,” then select “Flea Market” as the category. Let’s face it, our workshops are full of things that wouldn’t necessarily be valued at a “normal” garage sale. But that old analog scope, the tray of processors, and your third solder station that’s gathering dust under the bench deserve a home where they’ll be used and even cherished. That’s what the flea market is all about.

For that matter, it’s a great place to find stuff that you wouldn’t find at most garage sales, and is certainly worth checking out as a potential buyer. At the very least you can see what the Tindie flea pictured above is pushing around in its cart. Given Tindie’s mascot is a robotic dog named Ohm, I’d have to wonder what his thoughts on this guy would be.

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There’s no better way to make my ears perk than to start a story with a tidbit like “I am at the end of a 25 year career in nuclear weapons design at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory”. This is how Kris Winer starts of his interview with Maker.io.

Our friends over at Digikey have been in contact with several Tindie sellers and are beginning to publish interviews. I think it’s wonderful that our community is getting this recognition: if you want people who are building unique and bleeding edge hardware Tindie is the place to look.

Kris’ story is indicative of a rising engineering culture. While engaged in a challenging and fulfilling career by day, he started to look at how easy it had become to build electronics as a one-man shop at night. His 8-year old is to blame. Dad and son first bought some kits, quickly working through them before submitting to the siren song of their own custom boards. Kris’ company, Pesky Products, was born and the rest is history. Here are few of his own words on where this has taken him. Don’t forget to follow the link at the top for the entire interview.

I still do everything by myself but I have learned to reach out to collaborators for my more ambitious projects that require more skill than I currently have. Pesky Products is still my core business and one I still greatly enjoy, but it has led to several consulting jobs for customized electronics for startup companies all over the US. In some ways, Pesky Products is the marketing arm of my rapidly growing electronic design business.

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If you want to build a walking robot, the mechanical portion may seem like an afterthought. After all, it would seem that the big technology advances in the last 50 years have been in electronics, so how hard could it be?

For better or worse, it’s not usually that simple. Getting the dimensions of your body and legs correct, sourcing parts, then actually building the ‘bot can take a lot of time. Though fascinating for some (including myself), if you’d rather dwell on how to program the spider and set up sensors and electronics, this quadruped kit looks like a great solution.

Each leg uses two servos, which allows the limb to move vertically and horizontally. Considering the price of less than $60 including 8 servos, this little guy would be hard to beat if you need a ready-made chassis kit. You can find even more info on the kit here.

On the other hand, this concept could be upgraded with even better components, or simply serve as inspiration for your next ridiculous robotics project. Perhaps a scaled-up version with larger servos and remote control could be a good ride for your cat or small dog! First you’ve got to get its strut figured, check out SpierceTech’s early waking tests in the video below:

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Have you ever needed to log some data over a long time period, say months or years? This low power data-logging Arduino shield designed by Dead_Bug_Prototypes can last on one battery. Taking samples once per hour it will last about 1.75 years from an alkaline 9v or up to 3.5 years on a 7.2V 900mAh LiPo battery. Tindie buyers have left reviews for the shield with uses ranging from logging battery voltage in a remote antarctic camp for 3 months to logging the temperature in a vegetable garden.

So why use this shield in the first place? It turns out that using a normal Arduino board to log data long term is not possible due to the relatively large standby current drawn by these boards. Things like voltage regulators and pullup resistors on the board draw a constant 5-15mA which may not sound like much but will seriously restrict battery life. Dead_Bug_Prototypes measured his Arduino’s standby current at 25mA and got only 36 hours of run time when taking measurements every 30 seconds. After adding his shield and repeating this experiment, the data logger increased that time to 14 days.

The shield works by bypassing the Arduino’s stock voltage regulator. It then uses an on-board Real Time Clock (RTC) to wake up the Arduino every few minutes, take a reading before cutting all power to the Arduino. This means the Arduino is hardly ever powered, which gives huge energy savings compared to it just being in sleep mode. Data is stored on a micro SD card, making simple to pop out and copy over to your computer.

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Light painting, also called light graffiti, is a photography technique where a picture is taken in a dark environment, and light is selectively applied. Here’s a little more explanation of the technique in an article I wrote a while ago on Hackaday. One thing you might notice from that article, or your own experience, is that the lighting tools available are generally adapted from other uses.

But is there was something specifically made for this purpose? Well now there is, the “Light Painters Palette,” which allows you to select colors and lighting patterns via four 10mm RGB LEDs. It’s controlled via an Arduino Pro Mini, so if you’re not satisfied with how everything is set up, you can make changes as needed (code available on here on GitHub).

The kit linked above needs some assembly and you’ll need to provide your own Arduino, power supply, and infrared receiver if you want to use it. On the other hand, if you just want to start painting, it’s available fully assembled and programmed here, though you’ll still need to provide your own remote control transmitter if you’d like to use that feature. [Jdskier1] used the kind of inexpensive color remote that comes with a lot of addressable RGB strips so you may already have one of these on hand. Modes, remote control, and assembly are all shown off in his video found below — and the demo image shown above really illustrates the potential of this little board.

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Making a project wireless is cheap and easy thanks to the nRF24L01+ 2.4GHz radio transceiver. This development board made by Ceech caters to a wide range of project requirements whilst still making it easy to get up and running.

Many projects involving transceiver radios need to be battery powered; weather stations and sensor nodes to name two examples. Adding a battery to this board is made easy thanks to the MAX8903 3.7V lithium battery charger included, just solder on a header for a LiPo battery and you are good to go.

The board has a wide input voltage range thanks to the TPS63001 3.3V DC-DC buck-boost converter on-board. Any input voltage from 1.8V to 5.5V will work, making it easier to deal with a variety of power sources like solar panels for example. This buck-boost converter operates with an astonishing 96% efficiency and only draws typically around 30uA.

If your project calls for switching high current loads this board has a 30V 3A N-channel MOSFET to do the heavy lifting. This will let you add wireless control for motors, lights, solenoids, etc. There is a BME280 environmental sensor included on the board which can measure temperature, humidity and barometric pressure.

In summary, this board has high power switching, an environmental sensor, wide input voltage, and a LiPo battery charger. Basically it’s the Swiss Army knife of nRF development boards. Oh and it’s fully Arduino compatible too, with an ATMEGA32U4 microcontroller on the board and the all-too familiar Arduino shield footprint.

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