Tindie

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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If you want to take underwater photography or video, a GoPro camera with its versatile housing is generally a good choice. Able to protect the camera to a depth of 40 meters, or an even more impressive-sounding 131 feet, this gives most divers, surfers, and snorkelers plenty of room to record their activities.

If you need to go deeper, however, Group B Distribution has your answer. Though costing about as much as a GoPro camera itself, their nicely-anodized aluminum Extreme Depth housing allows immersion in water to an amazing depth of 5000 feet. If even that isn’t enough, the “GoBenthic” housing shown above is certified to protect these cameras to 8000 feet. They even claim that these housings are explosion and bullet-proof, but don’t recommend that users test this feature.

One disadvantage to their housing is a lack of external control except via WiFi if enabled. On the other hand, this should protect from accidental triggering or shutoff. Be sure to check out video from a GoPro in an Extreme Depth Housing after the “Read More” link!

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The majority of hobbyist robot projects that surface on the internet use either wheels or legs as their method of propelling themselves around. It’s time to consider the under-appreciated tank chassis. Aside from looking insanely cool, it means your robot can easily handle terrain that would cause problems for a robot rolling around on wheels or using a leg based mechanism.

To prove this point take a look at the Raspberry Tank made by Ian Renton. He bought the tank chassis and then added a Raspberry Pi and webcam with the intention of eventually making it autonomous. Check out a video of it in action below. Treads solve a common problem of deciding what to do with the wheels that aren’t being driven by motors. In this case there’s locomotion for each side and by driving just one tread, or driving both in opposite directions, the bot can turn on a dime.

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Developing an IoT based project is hard enough without having to also think about designing a PCB to fit your needs. This tiny ESP8285  IoT development board made by PeskyProducts aims to help you get your idea up and running with the minimum fuss possible.

This board has a lot of features that will appeal to someone who just wants to plug it in and get going with their project. First, it uses the ESP8285 which is just the ESP8266 with an added megabyte of embedded SPI flash memory. This is nice for a couple of reasons; the internal program memory means you don’t need to design for two discrete chips if you end up spinning your own board, and it doubles the space available with all of the most common ESP modules.

The MAX1555 LiPo charger chip included allows you to charge a LiPo battery via the USB Micro-B connector. Programming the board is as easy as plugging in the USB cable and opening up the Arduino IDE, with serial output to the Arduino serial monitor possible thanks to the on-board FTDI chip.

It can be plugged straight into a breadboard which will be very handy for quick prototyping of projects. As if it isn’t feature packed enough, PeskyProducts has included the footprint for a Bosch BME280 pressure, temperature and humidity sensor as well as Vishay’s VEML6040 RGBW ambient light sensor. This means you can easily turn this board into an environment / weather monitor or make your wearables react to the color of light at the club.

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Having something stolen is a terrible experience to go through especially when it comes to tracking down your goods. Giving a description of the item to the police often results in them looking for a needle in a haystack. What if you were able to give the police the exact GPS co-ordinates of your item? This TinyTracker GPS/GSM/CAN shield for Teensy 3.1/3,2 lets you do just that.

The shield was designed by Fusion and they provide a list of uses for the board which are either currently in use or have been tested and could work. One story is of an electric bicycle rental company that wants extra security for their bicycles. The board can be used to send back data from the bicycles existing cycle computer to a remote server for getting data about bicycle use like average trip length as well as sending back GPS data for bicycle tracking.

This TinyTracker has also been added to expensive quadcopters to send its position to a remote server every ten seconds. Its current location can also be requested by SMS. Another interesting application is the daily tracking of a Ford delivery van including information like battery state, fuel state and other CAN data. The included CAN bus on this device makes for some really interesting vehicle tracking/logging projects.

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