Tindie

Tapster describes itself as “a robot that automates mobile applications on a smartphone.” What that means in this case is that it uses a stylus device to imitate a human’s finger to automatically press a phone’s virtual buttons. This is accomplished with a delta robot setup, and, as shown in the video below playing the game 2048, can run at an impressive speed.

These robots are available to purchase for $750, though if you really want to make one for yourself, the design is open source and 3D printable. For that matter, I suppose that one could program a 3D printer or CNC router to do the same thing, but when it comes to automatically manipulating several-hundred-dollar phones, perhaps purchasing something built for the task is a good idea.

This device is designed by Selenium creator Jason Huggins, which is a tool to automate web browser tasks, either for testing or general automation. This seems like a natural hardware extension of that tool, and appears to work quite well. With a huge number of smartphone and tablet models in the wild, this type of automated testing is a good idea for any app that wants to ensure the best user experience across all devices. Or you can just use it to rack up a huge score on Candy Crush Saga.

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If you do a lot of debugging with IR transmitters or just want another cool gizmo to stash in your parts bin, this IR bullet may be just the thing for you. Consisting of just an IR LED inside of a BNC connector, the IR bullet keeps things simple.

You may be wondering why an IR LED  is being used as a receiver instead of just using an IR photo-diode. It turns out the creators of the IR bullet, Analysir, have done a lot of research into the topic of IR receivers and found most of them were not up to scratch for effective IR debugging. The reason for this is that IR receivers have the signal demodulator built into them.

These demodulators are tuned to a specific carrier frequencies; 38KHz is the most common for infrared communications. Unfortunately, it takes time for the IR signal to pass through the demodulator which results in a time lag on the output signal as well as distortion. This makes it difficult to debug an IR related problem because the distortion could be covering up the cause of the problem. You can read the full write-up about the topic over on the Analysir blog.

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This universal op-amp PCB should be in the parts bin of every electronics tinkerer on the planet. Everyone who works with electronics has been in a situation where they need to amplify a signal. The op-amp is an obvious choice for this task but what’s the fastest and easiest way to wire it up? In a pinch you could use a breadboard with something like an LM741 op-amp and some through hole resistors to get the job done. For something a bit more permanent you could solder the circuit onto some strip board. But a really slick solution is this Swiss Army Knife PCB that is a one-stop shop for all of your op-amp related needs.

This board supports two quad op-amps each with a bypass capacitor. All you need is an SMT op-amp and some resistors  and you will be able to quickly and easily put together any of the common op-amp circuits. The creator of the board, land-boards, has a wiki page with some of these circuits and how to wire them using this PCB. If you’ve ever made an op-amp circuit on a breadboard that turned into a bird’s nest of wires (and likely didn’t work properly), then this is the board for you!

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If you’re considering selling something on Tindie, an obvious question is “where do I get it made?” If you have a 3D printer, laser cutter, or are simply good and efficient with hand tools, these can present good solutions for very low volumes. Perhaps you have aspirations of selling not just tens, or even hundreds of your product, but scaling up to a volume that you simply couldn’t make by yourself.

You could attempt to hire staff, but another good option would be to get your product manufactured by another company. Many of these factories that can make your “widget” exist in China, meaning a huge amount of unfamiliarity for many Tindie sellers.

For a good introduction to the challenges of manufacturing a product in China, Akiba, creator of FreakLabs, has a series of videos answering questions on this challenging subject which were filmed during an AMA on SupplyFX. Questions were submitted in group chat from other engineers and range from pitfalls for small companies manufacturing in China to how you can transition to high volume manufacturing.

The videos, which sort of give the impression of talking to a friend, are certainly worth checking out. He touches on how it’s best to ramp up and learn slowly around 2:00 in the last (fifth) video, referencing how huge surges in orders such as a successful Kickstarter can be quite challenging!

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Smart Meters for utilities such as electricity, water and gas have been slowly but surely rolling out across the globe. Smart meters are important because they allow for real time communication between an energy provider and the consumer. This allows for a more efficient and faster reacting energy grid, also known as the Smart Grid.

So what is a smart meter? It is an electronic energy meter (whether it be for water, gas, or electricity) that relays the energy usage back to the utility for monitoring and billing. What this means is that more and more households will have a device that can potentially tell them in real time what their energy usage is. Notice the use of ‘potentially’ in that last sentence.

Unfortunately some countries for whatever crazy reason insist on keeping this data between the meter and the utility provider. Ireland recently introduced mandatory water charges and installed just under a million smart water meters that communicate via RFID. Only the utility company has the ability to read the meters. The consumer has no access to the data whatsoever which in 2016 is a hugely backwards move.

Thankfully in France and many other countries, the story is different. The electricity meters in France come with a serial port that spits out energy usage once per second. The Micro Teleinfo V1.1 is a simple Serial-USB adapter that allows you to hook up the meter to a Raspberry Pi for example. From there you can log power usage to an SQL database, generate graphs, and only about a million other things. The great thing about these meters having a serial port is that you could read the data with a simple microcontroller and have a light in the house that changes colour from green to red depending on energy usage. This all fits in with the idea of smart homes we have been hearing about for the past decade. Utility companies making the data accessible is great electronic tinkering fodder, lets hope other countries copy the French!

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When you buy a USB hub from your favorite electronics dealer, what you expect is something that allows you to multiply one port into several. This is obviously quite useful, but what if you want to cut off power to one of your ports automatically? Hubs with individual manually-controlled switches exist, but an automatic way to shut one off didn’t exist… until now.

As shown in the video below, Nsboa’s 5 volt USB hub allows you to plug in up to 16 USB devices for power or charging, which can be switched via the onboard relays. These relays can be controlled via an Arduino or your microcontroller of choice, allowing for a wide array of remote or autonomous control options.

If you’re wondering, this version only transmits power, not data. According to the Nsboa, a future version may allow for data transmission, but development could take a while. Until then, you can charge 16 flashlights, GoPro cameras, or tiny quadcopter batteries, then automatically shut them off as needed!

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The widely used USB protocol is not the easiest thing to understand, especially if you are a beginner. With the USBuddy breakout board you can easily tap into the USB signals coming and going while the device is still connected to the bus. It also monitors power consumption.

This board also comes in handy for reverse engineering devices without having to take the device apart. There are several USB logic analyzers available out there. The most popular being a “Salae Compatible” model available for less than 10 euros if you buy from China. This cheap model can only analyse USB 2.0 but it is still enough to give a great introduction to USB and reverse engineering.

If you are developing a high power device, the USBuddy can tolerate a whopping 4 amps and 24 Volts. This seems excessive (and is far beyond the USB spec), but in these days of high power USB “fast charging” you may find you need these parameters while working on that next great product.

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This universal garage door opener is compatible with roughly 90% of all commercial garage door remote controls. Over the past few years more and more of these remotes have become standardized which is good news for the electronics tinkerer.

This board comes with 4 inputs and 4 outputs. The outputs would be for sending an enable signal to the garage door motors whilst the inputs would be for things like limit switches or obstacle sensors. The receiver module used is the RXUL01 433Mhz which is compatible with not only most garage door remotes but also remotes for things like blinds and lights etc. This opens up the possibility of using this board for other things like a wireless sprinkler system, remote irrigation system, or even intruder detection. With a reception range of 80M using the wire antenna or 150M with a rod antenna, there are a ton of cool projects you could build with this. It has me thinking about multi-stall garage door control features like on volunteer fire houses — when the alarm goes off this can make sure all the right doors are open in plenty of time.

For a list of some common compatible remotes check out this list.

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Model trains in one form or another have been around for well over 100 years, and the work and detail that goes into some of these sets is really incredible. Given this attention to detail and the inherent electrical nature of many of these sets, it only makes sense to interface one with a computer, like the small and powerful Raspberry Pi.

You could interface a ‘Pi by running individual wires to each of your switch motors and lights, but this would obviously become complicated quickly, leading to potential setup frustrations and maintenance issues. Another great option, available here on Tindie, is the PiRyte interface board. The main interface board in this kit stacks on top of a Raspberry Pi computer, allowing it to communicate to remote modules via CAT5 Cables, rather than individual wires. This should simplify things greatly, and allow one to control tracks or lights with a relatively simple setup.

The video below gives an introduction to the system using a yard panel as an interface. As the video points out though, given the capability of the Raspberry Pi, this type of interface is only a small part of what it could do in this situation. For that matter, it would seem a system like this could have a huge number of applications outside of model train control, where someone simply wants a good way to wire inputs and outputs remotely

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It’s close, but the BeanDuino may well be the smallest dev board we have featured on Tindie so far. This board is in fact a clone of another dev board called the digispark which is also quite tiny but it uses the PCB as a USB connector which adds a fair amount of area to the board. The BeanDuino has taken a different approach to adding USB connectivity by using a micro USB port on the board, saving on space.

This tiny board is Arduino compatible and can communicate via USB. You will need to flash the chip with the micronucleus tiny85 bootloader first to enable the chip to act as a USB device. There are 5 I/O pins on the board. Two of these go to USB communication only if the device actively communicates via USB. Of those 5 I/O you have 4 ADC pins and 3 PWM enabled pins. There is also an internal temperature sensor and an LED attached to pin PB1. Having a board this size communicate via USB coupled with a few I/O pins definitely has some cool project potential.

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