Are you a percussionist who wants to take your beats to the next level? Enter the Backbeater. It’s a piezoelectric vibration sensor adapted to work with smartphones which could also have other applications. ESD, the maker behind the product, had an idea for a reverse metronome. The hardware pairs with a free iPhone app.
Tindie
Featured: Backbeater Sensor for iPhones
Meet the Maker: Jeff Murchison
Jeff Murchison describes himself as a “one man maker, tinkerer, and experimenter”. His most recent product is the TinyLoadr Shield, which allows you to program microcontrollers using Arduino. He shares his projects and experiences on his own blog, where you can also find tutorials and open source code.
What first got you excited about electronics? Do you remember your first project? When I was younger my dad had a large workshop that had drawers and drawers full of electronic components. While I never really learned more than how to make an LED turn on, I always thought electronics in general were interesting. As for my first real project, that was my automatic foosball scoreboard which came to fruition a couple of years ago when I finally decided to start learning about electronics.
How did you decide to start selling the products you’d built? The first PCB that I designed was for an Arduino shield that I made for programming ATtiny and ATmega microcontrollers. I used a Chinese PCB fab where the minimum order was 10 PCBs. When I had assembled my own I still had 9 PCBs left over that were just going to go in a drawer. Tindie had launched shortly before that so I decided to take a stab at trying to sell the remaining boards. I bought a bunch of extra components, listed them for sale, and people bought them!
Why Tindie and not somewhere else? To be honest I never even really considered selling them other places. Tindie had launched itself as a marketplace for makers and that seemed like the perfect fit to me.
Any new products on the horizon? I’m actually just waiting on some new PCBs for a personal home automation project of mine, which may make their way onto Tindie in the future.
Watch an Illustration Become Reality: The Topsy Turvy Clock
Have you ever seen something on TV and though “If only that existed in real life”? Most people have, but most people don’t take the next step and go about building the object from scratch.
This is exactly what Andy, the maker from the electronics blog Workshopshed did when he saw the Topsy Turvy Clock on an episode of The Mr. Men. The idea is that the numbers are randomly placed but the time is still accurate – Andy thought he could make it work, but not without a solid game plan.
More directly from Andy:
What’s that new product doing there?
We’re constantly looking for ways to make Tindie more effective for new inventors. There is a constant struggle between showing products the community loves and mixing in new inventions that were just listed and seeing early success. With those points in mind, we released a new algorithm that will make it much easier for new products to move to the front.
Before
The previous algorithm was a frecency algorithm based upon earnings over time. The thinking being that the more successful a product was over time, then the more folks we should expose it to. Pretty simple.
Now
We are still using a frecency algorithm but it will be based upon earnings over page views over time. This will allow new products with very few page views but significant sales to move up the queue quickly. The barrier for a product to jump up the list has been lowered quite significantly.
What’s next?
We’ll continue to watch how this affects sales, however we are very hopeful that this will make the community even more dynamic. If you have any thoughts, please leave them in the forum. This is a subtle change wit ha big impact. We can’t wait to hear your thoughts!
Awesome Project Alert!
John at Walltech spent last weekend hacking Arduino YÚN. Access to the Google Youtube API, Arduino, and some clever programming allowed him to build this:
What is it? An internet connected YouTube subscriber notice that in a message on an LCD screen, prints the number of subscribers any channel you want has, and lets you know if they’ve uploaded a new video in the last hour!
For a full write up and instructions on how to create your own YouTube ticker, check out John’s post.
Featured: 3D-Printed Pinhole Camera
If you’re an electronics nerd AND a photography nerd, prepare to have your day made: Tindie seller Schlaboratory is selling a medium format 120mm film camera. You have the option of buying the parts as a kit, or even a fully assembled camera! The pieces take 18 hours to print, and assembly instructions are available for download on Thingaverse. This would make a great gift!
Featured Product: Chrip!
How does your garden grow? If you’re gifted with a green thumb, now’s the time of year you begin to see green shoots popping up in your house and yard, the promise of produce and flowers to come later in the summer.
If your thumb is not so green, you need Chirp!. Chirp! uses capacitive humidity sensing to monitor moisture levels plant’s soil. It alerts you when the soil is dry, and even can tell whether it’s day or night (no annoying wake-ups). Since Chirp! is open source, you might find even more uses for this straightforward device.
This product was created by Catnip Electronics, and you can learn more and read reviews here.
So You Want to be an Indie Electronics Maker? 3 Tips for Getting Started
By day, Jason Hotchkiss is a software developer in the UK. By night, he’s an electronics hobbyist who runs one of the most popular stores on Tindie. Today he’s sharing three tips for n00bs: Where to start if you think indie electronics are awesome, but don’t know how to begin. 1. Have some application in mind! When getting into any new field, there is way too much to take in all at once, so you need to target your efforts and focus in on just one small bit. As you get more understanding and confidence you can step back and widen the view. Don’t be put off by the fact you don’t understand anything to begin with – its how we all got started!
2. Get yourself an Arduino board and try out one of the many projects people have documented online. Play with other people’s projects and libraries as a starting point, but remember to keep pushing back the boundaries of your knowledge. Try to understand *how* things work. If you get someone else’s Instructable working, try to recreate it from scratch. Keep asking yourself if there is a better way to do something and try to find it; do you really need an Arduino board to flash those lights or could you use a 555 chip? It might take you longer, but you’ll have learned something new you can apply in the future.
3. Give back – share your work. Going open-source can sound counter to the entrepreneurial spirit, but it will certainly work in your favour in the longer term and will help you build up connections. It will also help the next person who is starting where you were.
How One Maker’s Frustration Lead To a Booming Business
Nick Johnson had been programming for years before he joined a Hackspace and got hooked on indie electronics. His first project was a simple Arduino motor driver shield, but in true hacker style he quickly progressed from there to building his own tools.
While working on a project that needed a power supply tested, Nick says “I found that all the existing solutions for hobbyists like myself were unsatisfactory: they were either hugely expensive, or jerry-rigged and unreliable.” That’s when he decided to design the original Re:load for his own use.
Nick was surprised when multiple people expressed interest in buying a Re:load for their own projects, but he listed the product on Tindie. In what he called “No time at all,” he had made hundreds of sales through his Tindie store, Arachnid Labs.
The original Re:load experienced such success that Nick designed an updated, more robust version with extra features. He recently ran a Kickstarter campaign to help with the tooling and setup costs of producing this new, more advanced product. Nick was, in his own words “Cautiously optimistic that I’d reach the goal,” but that caution was clearly unnecessary. Within days, his winning product had blown the original goal out of the water.
You can now find the Re:load Pro for sale in Nick’s Tindie store – it’s on backorder, but Nick carefully planned ahead for sustainability. Because the manufacturing chain for the Re:load Pro is lined up, he anticipates being able to ship within 2 months.
So, what’s next for Nick and Arachnid Labs? “The Re:load Pro is going to keep me busy for a while, especially with everyone demanding the fan kit addon as soon as possible. I do have a number of other projects in the works, though, but nothing I’m yet ready to announce!”
Tindie <3 Discourse
Since 2012, we’ve had the same forums. While the rest of the site got updated, the forums kept chugging along. Today that is changing, and it will have huge implications for the rest of the site. Technically, we’ve replaced our old forums application with a totally new application, Discourse. What makes this truly exciting is we are overhauling other key parts of the Tindie experience with Discourse too.
Using Discourse as our new forums will seem lightyears ahead of the old forums. There are honestly too many amazing features to list in this post. To preserve the old forums, there will be a link in the Forums header. The one caveat being users won’t be able to submit new content to them. However we are incredibly excited about this change – new forums, new topics, new conversations!
We’re also adding Discourse to our new blog and will be utilizing it for our comments. This will allow for more rich conversations on our blog posts – especially as we ramp up our blogging efforts. This is on the way, but we wanted to give everyone a heads up.
But wait, there’s more!
We’re also announcing the return of private messaging – also powered by Discourse! Many moons ago we had a private messaging system which was retired in favor of public Q&A. While the public Q&A has been great, many conversations shouldn’t be had in public. This will be perfect for those situations.
With all of the work we have put into this integration, we are incredibly excited to unveil it to the community. Updating the forums, blog comments and private messaging are just the tip of the iceberg. There very well may be more integrations in the future, but this is a great start!
