Tindie

MakeCode Arcade is a neat way to create simple games using a Scratch-like interface. It’s focus is on education, but in the right hands, a lot can be done with this platform. Not only can you preview the games in your browser, but you can also download them in multiple formats to run on various microcontrollers. This is where the MAGC comes in — you connect a Pico and load your games onto an SD card, and you have a physical console to play your games on!

Seeing your game come to life on a physical device is a lot of fun. It’s a great way to introduce kids to programming. The MakeCode Arcade website is absolutely packed full of tutorials and examples to get you started, as well as thousands of games made by others.

If you feel restrained by the Scratch-like interface, don’t worry — you can take complete control using either JavaScript or Python! There are some incredible games made by talented developers on this platform. So whether you want to use it for education, for learning game development, or just to play some neat games made by others, the MAGC is a great choice. And to top it all off, the design files are available for the MAGC, so you can tweak it or use the 3D model to print a custom case!

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The phone system was once the communication lifeblood of the world. Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) lines were connected to almost every home worldwide. But then cell phones and broadband internet came along and spelled doom for traditional telephones. Now it’s actually quite challenging to get a real POTS line installed — most providers of “home telephone” service will simply send you a box that plugs into your modem/router and creates a virtual line. Well, this POTS shield does more than just provide a VoIP line.

It’s designed to completely emulate a central office, providing all the correct voltages needed for older rotary phones to operate. This shield attaches to a GUI development board called the gCore, giving a nice GUI for configuration, as well as enabling WiFi and Bluetooth connections with the ESP32 built-in. With Bluetooth enabled, you can connect your old rotary phone to your smartphone and make and receive calls with the hands-free Bluetooth profile. Work is proceeding to enable it to be connected to a VoIP system like Asterisk (or your choice of commercial VoIP provider) if you want to use it separately from your current phone.

One of the really cool features is that you can connect it to existing POTS wiring in your home, allowing all your existing phone outlets to be operational again, if you so choose! You can make talking on the phone a highlight of your day by setting up a small phone table with a comfortable chair and notepad. Or, if your house still has a telephone room (which were very common in houses built in the first half of the 20th century) you can bring it back to its original purpose.

If you’re interested in phones, be sure to check out the entire weeBell project over on Hackaday.io. If you have the skill to contribute, the project is open source and looking for contributors!

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The 74HC595 has long been one of my favourite logic ICs. It takes a serial bitstream and converts it into a parallel output with 3-state drivers. They can be cascaded almost infinitely, allowing you to create extremely wide parallel output stages for driving large LED displays or just about anything else that needs an on/off signal. This 8-Bit Serial DAC uses the 74HC595 shift register to drive an R2R resistor ladder, creating a basic DAC (digital to analog converter) that’s not only inexpensive but opens up the internals of a DAC for you to probe with test equipment.

The downsides of using an R2R ladder are typically decreased accuracy and higher integral and differential nonlinearity. Don’t know what those are? Well, this kit is a great way to learn! Because discrete resistors are never quite the exact same value, you end up with slight differences between the ideal voltage output at any particular value and what is actually output. Even in DACs that are part of integrated circuits, getting the resistors laser-trimmed can’t quite remove all this nonlinearity. Instead, it can just be reduced to an acceptable level for any particular application.

Because the 74HC595 is limited to roughly 30MHz (individual devices vary, and you can test a few to find some that can handle higher frequencies), an 8-Bit DAC like this is limited to at most 3.75Msps. This is more than adequate for even very high-quality audio output, and even high enough to do some basic RF experimentation in the AM radio band.

The project has been released under the MIT license, so you can study the implementation and make changes or implement a similar circuit yourself on a breadboard! But for the price, it’s nice to have all the components on a PCB with a convenient pin header for attaching to a microcontroller.

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Since its debut the RP2040 chip has seen a steady increase in usage but often people’s first experience with this chip is on the official Raspberry Pi Pico board. It’s an excellent board but it’s good to see more choice of platform for any chip. This Micro RP2040 board from SB Components is functionally very similar to the Pico but has a few other attractive features!

First of all — the clue is in the name — it’s small! Whilst the product listing doesn’t actually specify the dimensions, counting up the 2.54mm pitch pin headers leads us to guess it’s around 24mm * 24mm. This is less than half the size of the Pico and certainly should be able to find a home in the smallest of projects. Another difference from the Pico is that the Micro RP2040 has USB-C, which is excellent — no more fumbling to get the cable the correct way around! It has slightly fewer GPIO than a full-size Pico. There are 23 GPIO pins broken out as opposed to 30 on the Pico, which is still plenty for most projects. The RP2040 is a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ with 264KB of SRAM and 2MB of Flash — more than enough for just about any project you can imagine!

The board has through-hole pads that are also castellated, meaning that the Micro RP2040 can be surface mounted onto a PCB, even when hand soldering! It’s a very affordable board and, although there are now lots of options for RP2040 modules, this board is a handy solution for those projects short on space!

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While MIDI is a fairly simple protocol, it has unique requirements for the physical layer. Because it was designed to be used as part of a larger system, which might be on stage with hundreds of other cables carrying line voltage, amplified signals, and all sorts of issues with grounding, MIDI is supposed to be isolated. This means the receiving end of a MIDI cable should have an optocoupler or other isolation barrier to prevent damage to the equipment, no matter what is happening to the cable. Getting this right is often overlooked, but now you can drop the MIDI CHIP, a MIDI-compliant module, into any project and immediately get bi-directional, isolated MIDI connections.

The MIDI CHIP is a nice, simple design that offers 5300Vrms isolation and comes as a pair, so you’ve got one for both ends of a connection! It is breadboard compatible, using standard 0.1″ headers spaced appropriately. But it can also be used directly, soldered or glued into just about anywhere with its tiny 0.7″ x 0.85″ (~1.8cm x 2.15cm) footprint.

A simple jumper can switch it to a buffered MIDI Thru, which is a nice feature as it adds isolation to an existing connection. It can also operate at either 3.3 or 5V, again depending on a solder jumper. This allows it to interface with just about any popular microcontroller platform! It’s a perfect match for the Arduino MIDI Library. Seeing as how MIDI is essentially just a serial stream at 31250 baud, it’s easy to interface with the UART portion of a microcontroller, so building custom controllers or MIDI sniffers with these boards is a snap.

If you’re into synths, chiptunes, or just MIDI control in general, the MIDI CHIP is bound to find a use in one of your projects. As mentioned before, you get a pair for the price, which is a great deal! If you want built-in MIDI connectors, check out the MIDI CHIP Pro from the same seller, a complete MIDI module ready to be added to any project!

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Music is a melodic, entrancing, and entirely alien language that artists explore, expressing anything from their most base emotions to complicated feelings about our human experience. Contemporary music is usually filtered through a lens of preconceived input methods; keyboards, guitars, drum kits, and vocal cords. However, approaching music creation like a child might approach play encourages experimental and innovative compositions – and that’s where we meet the Drawdio.

This pretty pink pencil packs a phenomenal punch on paper, transforming artists into electronic pied pipers who use the natural conductivity of graphite to connect new pitches and timbres. Initially designed by Jay Silver, the sonic wizardry of this design is even easier to access with Los Aparatos‘ clean and pre-assembled construction. Not only do you receive a fully-assembled, well-designed iteration of the Drawdio – but this version even includes a direct audio output for super clean recordings!

There is a lot of documentation about the Drawdio online. Artists can learn a lot from the Drawdio website, where there are many tips and tricks to uncover, and Los Aparatos even provides a complete video guide in Spanish. If you want an example of how this device sounds, Los Aparatos can help out with this quick demo video!

Los Aparatos is an independent electronics engineer, teacher, and musician. Entranced by Arduino since 2008, this experienced maker is making their Tindie debut with this product – but I get the feeling they’ve got even more exciting ideas up their sleeve!

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The Ham CH552 Micro from Ham Studios is a tiny, breadboard-friendly development board for the famously inexpensive CH55x line of microcontrollers from WCH-IC. They are based on an 8051 core with a few peripherals, including USB in the CH552! This USB connection allows a small bootloader to run, making it Arduino-compatible thanks to some hard work from the Arduino community.

Despite its size and cost, the CH552 has all the peripherals you’d expect in a small 8-bit microcontroller. It has multiple timers, two UARTs, an ADC and comparator, dedicated PWM peripherals, plus 16K of flash, 256 bytes of instruction RAM (essentially acting as a cache) and 1k of what WCH calls “xRAM”, which seems to be general-purpose RAM that’s connected to the DMA bus. And with the addition of USB, the price seems almost too good to be true.

Ham Studios have added an onboard WS2812B RGB LED and put the chip on a very small, breadboard-friendly breakout board with a Micro-B USB connector. There are some open-source tools available for working with these chips if you want to avoid using Arduino, including ch55xtool and the Small Device C Compiler (sdcc). Because it uses an 8051 core, the instruction set is extremely well documented, and the special function register locations have been documented so you can access the peripherals from your code.

The board is small enough to fit inside all sorts of things. I could see myself putting one inside my laptop, wiring it into the USB bus, and adding some extra touch macro keys along the top edge of my keyboard. Or perhaps use one as a real-time co-processor for a Raspberry Pi.

If you’ve ever thought about checking out this line of microcontrollers, the Ham CH552 is a great way to get started!

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On the surface, this Game Boy Color USB-C Charging Kit Pro might just seem like another quick “USB converter” type approach. However, beyond the header photo of a vintage Game Boy Color with a USB cable lies a whole heap of modifications wrapped in a clean board design.

Common Game Boy Color modifications include adding IPS displays with backlighting. Often this leads to power supply modification as these displays are more power-hungry, gobbling up more than the original 2 x AA batteries can provide. A common approach is to incorporate some kind of boost converter and swap out the AA batteries for a modern LiPo. Plenty of people in the scene have accomplished this using separate boost and charge modules but this PCB kit neatly incorporates both boost and charge controllers on board.

The Game Boy Color has reasonable audio in its stock form. Chiptune aficionados tend to rank it as better than the GBA or Pocket but not quite matching the quality of the original DMG Game Boy. That said, another common mod for the Color is to add a small audio amplifier on the audio output to improve the levels. Again this can add a lot of clutter and wiring. This module simplifies the process with an audio amp also included.

Looking through the product page you will see just how perfectly this PCB sits in a Game Boy Color. It’s a really neat solution for numerous mods. Finally, it’s USB-C! So with some small modifications to your Game Boy Color shell, you are up and running with all the advantages of USB-C. We love USB-C — not having to turn the USB connector over three times to get it to go in the right way is a joy

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June 21st marked the summer solstice, the longest day of the year! The Sun is high in the sky, and shines as long as it can, giving us more daylight to enjoy and…. to harvest with solar power! Integrating solar power into your projects is easier than ever, and as the price of solar panels continues to drop as their efficiency rates rise, now is a great time to pick up a few panels to play with, like this High-Efficiency Circular Solar Panel.

These panels are high-efficiency models, meaning while most models on the market are about 17% to 20% efficient in converting solar power to electricity, this panel boasts a strong 22% efficiency rate. The solar panel has a maximum open circuit voltage of 7.0V and a peak voltage of 5.5V, making it perfect for charging single-cell lithium batteries or powering small circuits. If more power is needed though, several of these can be wired up in a series or parallel configuration, just like with other solar panels. An array of these cute, circular panels could be the perfect finishing touch to an outdoor project.

These solar panels, and a few others, are available from Open Green Energy, based in New Dehli, India. If you’re intrigued by solar power but don’t know where to start, give their Youtube channel a look for inspiration and education!

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For years, I’ve been running a Raspberry Pi with an ADS-B receiver to track and submit information about nearby airplanes to multiple websites which aggregate the data. It’s neat to see what airplanes my little Pi can see. And while ADS-B is becoming mandatory in airplanes. boats have their very own system called AIS. It provides much of the same data — position, track, speed, boat type/name, etc. However, there haven’t been that many easily accessible AIS trackers to play with. Now the dAISy FeatherWing and dAISy Mini AIS Receiver (heh, see what they did there with the name?) are available and designed to be easy to integrate into new or existing projects.

Whether you simply want to see what boats are in your area, or you have a need to track specific vehicles in an area (say, as a boat rental company), you can quickly set up and customize AIS reception with these boards. They have excellent dual-channel AIS receivers that support all official AIS frequencies, as well as a low-noise amplifier front-end to help boost weak signals. They output data in a standard NMEA format (anyone familiar with GPS will have seen NMEA before). The format is called NMEA AIVDS and is extensively documented.

The entire board can be controlled via I2C, and NMEA data can be read from a UART at 38400 baud. Alternatively, all data can be read out over I2C, which might be faster depending on your application. And the boards are quite power-efficient — even with the LNA operating, they consume well under 100mA. With the LNA disabled, it gets all the way down to 35mA, which at 3.3V is only 115mW! Pretty good for a quality RF receiver. The documentation for both boards looks excellent, which is always a good sign that the designer cares about the end user!

The FeatherWing is, of course, completely compatible with Adafruit’s line of Feather boards. The dAISy Mini is a similar size, but with standard 0.1″ headers, or alternatively a JST-GH connector compatible with many flight controllers, in case you want to receive AIS from your drone!

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