Tindie

If you own an Ikea Vindriktning (a very inexpensive PM2.5 air quality monitor), this board allows you to take over its functionality and add wireless capability! After you’ve disassembled your Vindriktning, you need to salvage a few parts from the original PCB, and then replace the entire thing with the new board from seller Realtime’s Oddities.

Because this build requires salvaging parts from a populated board, you’ll want to have a decent amount of soldering experience under your belt, and a hot air station for desoldering SMD parts. Once you’ve got it installed though, it’s an ESP8266-based system so interfacing with just about any remote software is possible. ESPHome is easy to configure, and with some tweaking, it shouldn’t be too hard to get it working with Home Assistant or any remote logging software you want to use.

A neat feature of this board is the ability to add more sensors. With a few I2C headers exposed, you could add just about any sensor type you want. With a BME280 or similar, you could easily add humidity and temperature for a more complete picture of air quality. Or add one of the analog MQ-x sensors to detect carbon monoxide, natural gas, smoke, or a range of other airborne pollutants. Fitting all this into an existing stylish Ikea case is a great way to hide some sensors in your home without affecting the look of your space!

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I know I’m not the only one out there who constantly checks their phone. Whenever there’s a spare moment, the phone gets instantly unlocked and notifications checked. This becomes such an unconscious habit that often we don’t realize just how much we are doing it! It can come off as rude when you’re with a group of people. It’s also just not great for our mental well-being. So if you want to decrease your screen time, the Subtle Timer is an awesome way to do it.

It has three built-in timers for 10, 30 and 60 minutes. Simply press one of the three buttons, put your phone face down, and place the Subtle Timer on top. Whenever you get the urge to pick up your phone, check to see if the timer lights are still on. If they are, don’t touch it! Go back to what you were doing, pick up a book or magazine, or grab a pen and paper and write a journal entry! Do something to get your hands and mind busy. Or use it during mealtimes or other social gatherings, to remind yourself to stay in the moment.

This sleek little board uses a CR2032 battery and has built-in magnets that can stick to many phones, including the newest iPhones, and can be used when the device isn’t in use to stick to your laptop or nearby lamp for safekeeping. If you’re serious about decreasing screen time, this might be the method for you — and you simultaneously get to support a new Tindie seller!

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The Glamos Walker is a portable LoRaWan device with heaps of capabilities. It’s a veritable Swiss Army knife for those involved in deploying sensors and devices to LoRaWan networks, or indeed those deploying gateways and building network capacity.  In simple terms, the Glamos Walker enables the user to send, receive and view packets on the device; additionally, the unit has GPS so with this positioning capability you can map your network and device positions.

If you send a message from the device you can view all the message details on the device screen, including time, the GPS coordinates the message was sent from, the names of base stations receiving the message, and signal quality characteristics like RSSI and SNR as well as the frequency and spread factor. There is also a Walker server backend and an app which enables you to view all these details overlaid onto a map view.

You can also connect the device in the field to a wireless hotspot, such as your mobile phone. This allows real-time monitoring where it will return the names of all the gateways receiving a message and the RSSI and SNR values for the corresponding message receipts. This is an ideal tool for optimizing the position of devices/sensors in the field or analyzing the effect of walls and obstacles in indoor deployments. It’s also going to be of great use deploying gateways and determining the best position for them. We can also imagine this being a fantastic tool for testing antennas and many more applications.

There are heaps more modes and functionality we haven’t mentioned in this post, but there’s a detailed overview of all the features on the product page. Check if out if you’re into LoRa and LoRaWAN!

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It only seems like yesterday that the Raspberry Pi Pico was the new kid on the block and therefore any type of accessory was worthy of mention. These days our cup runs over with all manner of add-ons and systems built around the venerable Pico. Sometimes though, a simple breakout is all we need and this Pico Breakout Board combines that simplicity with some ruggedness in the form of screw terminals.

Plug in a Pico and every onboard pin is broken out giving you a choice of connector. First up are standard pin sockets and pin headers perfect for if you want to connect over to another breadboard for your project. Finally on each edge of the board are the screw terminal outputs. This is a great addition which adds a level of security to the connections and they would also accommodate larger cable connections.

The board itself includes Pico-compatible mount holes so you can affix the Pico to the breakout thoroughly and in turn, the breakout board has a further four M2 size mount holes for you to mount it to your project. We definitely think this could make a solid and secure base for your next moving Pico project!

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The FuseRFv2 from Woodoonics brings the flexibility and power of the ATmega328 and the associated Arduino bootloader with the wireless functionality of the nRF24L01+! This makes developing simple RF projects much easier. The nRF24L01+ is a single-chip 2.4GHz transceiver that can support a wide range of applications using the worldwide ISM band. It has a built-in, automatically packetized protocol called Enhanced ShockBurst™ which makes wireless data transfer between multiple nodes simple to implement. It automatically searches for valid packets and confirms them with a CRC checksum.

Applications like wireless keyboards and mice are easy to implement, and even audio can be sent over the link with up to 2Mbps link speed. As more and more Wi-Fi chipsets move to 5GHz, and now with WiFi 6 to the 1.2GHz wide 6GHz band, the 2.4GHz ISM band is getting quieter and much more usable.

The onboard voltage regulator can supply up to 500mA, so the nRF24L01+ will have lots of juice to transmit at full power if needed. Also, the USB connection is available for HID device emulation, so a pair of these could easily send data back and forth between USB host devices. If you have any existing nRF24L01 modules, they can communicate with this board too, so you can add on to an existing network if you have one running.

All the ease of Arduino, with the power and flexibility of the nRF24L01+! Check out the listing and the video below if you’re interested in learning more.

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This fresh take on the traditional Arduino layout is the GlowDuino Uno. Featuring LEDs on almost every I/O pin and a bevy of other tweaks and additions brings a breath of fresh air to a board that has remained more or less unchanged for the better part of a decade. The developers behind the GlowDuino looked at what more could be squeezed out of the ATmega328PB and found four I/O pins that weren’t being used.

That’s right — the GlowDuino Uno has four more I/O pins than the standard Uno. Two of them are analog inputs as well! These aren’t just any pins, either — by adding these four pins to the header, it’s now possible to have 2 I2C buses, 2 SPI buses, or 2 serial ports. Or you can now have 8 analog inputs or 9 PWM outputs!

The changes are more than just a few additional I/O pins, though. The board uses USB-C, so it’s possible to supply much more current to attached devices than with traditional USB-B. The 5V and 3.3V rails can output a combined 1 amp, and all I/O voltages are switchable between 5V and 3.3V. The LEDs on all the traditional I/O pins are driven by MOSFETs, so they don’t have much of a measurable impact on the impedance of those I/Os. The documentation and design files hosted on GitHub are great resources for getting started with this board.

If you’re looking to upgrade your go-to Arduino dev board, this could be a great choice. It’s very well-constructed, and with the additional flexibility and ease of use offered with the new design, it makes a great board to have on your desk all the time!

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One of the most useful tools I ever made was a converted Dremel workstation to hold a cheap soldering iron to be used to heat and press into place thermal inserts into 3D printed parts. It’s a handy rig and you can create very strong threaded connections using thermal inserts; however the tip on my soldering iron needed modification to just get it to work well with one size, M3. These Hakko Thermal Insert tips have been manufactured to fit a range of insert sizes, while also preventing damage to your usual soldering iron tip.

These tips are designed to be compatible with the Hakko FX-888D irons and as such, they are classed as a T18 style tip. It’s worth pointing out that there are many other manufacturers of soldering irons out there that use T18-compatible tips so you may find other soldering iron options available to you for your rig.

The tips cover a range of insert sizes from M2 to M5 and include an M2.5 tip — a great choice as M2.5 is a common mount size for Raspberry Pi, and M3 is common across Arduino and many other boards. If you’re into 3D printing, it’s important to get a decent fit and finish on the inserts to maximise the strength of the joint and we think these would help make that job a breeze. Give your prints a professional touch with metal threaded inserts!

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Do you play euchre? My family has always played it whenever we get together for holidays. It’s always a riot, with my uncle trying to sneakily deal multiple times in a row (according to him, the rule is you have to catch him before he starts dealing). As we tend to play during the holidays, sometimes we get into a state where remembering trump is difficult! Well, the Euchre Cube is sure to come in handy.

Euchre is a trick-taking card game, in which a particular suit is the “trump” and will always beat any other suit, or lower cards of the same suit. The particular rules used differ from region to region, but the Wikipedia article goes into a lot of detail. It’s a great game to play if you have four people together celebrating a holiday!

The Euchre Cube is made from laser-cut birch and acrylic and uses RGB LEDs that gently fade, change colour, or blink depending on the orientation. It runs off of 2 CR2032 batteries and automatically times out after three hours. If you have a Euchre-loving member of your family, this is a great birthday or holiday gift!

It might not stop my uncle from slyly dealing twice in a row, but at least we’ll always know what suit is trump! Check out the video below for a demo:

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Some projects find their way into a precarious, delicate position; perhaps they aren’t worthy of a complete PCB design and manufacture but linger on a breadboard for a long time as they are just too good to tidy away. If that sounds familiar, the Breadboard PCB might be just what you need.

This 1.6mm thick printed circuit board is laid out to emulate the common breadboard we all know and love with its neatly labelled and numbered rows. It has all the negative rails connected but has left the positive rails separated so you can use split power arrangements. It has some useful mounting holes which, if you have gone to the lengths of permanently mounting up your circuit, would lend themselves to mounting the device in an enclosure.

Apart from this, there’s not a lot to say about this simple and affordable accessory, except we do like the silkscreen design that says “HACK” across the board — although we know we would try not to cover it up!

Finally, on the listing for this board, Hack Modular mentions they have some other items listed that aim to help make breadboarding a less frustrating experience; check out their Breadboard Buddies for a neat example!

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We’ve all run into it at some point: you’re on a videoconference or phone call, and suddenly you click the wrong thing or hit the wrong button and music starts playing or a YouTube video blares out. You quickly try and turn it down or hit the mute button, but in your haste, you can’t quite remember what the mute hotkey is! Well, having a physical volume mixer like the Deej can be handy in these situations. Simply slide the master volume to zero, and bam — no more noise!

Or perhaps you’re a gamer, and you’re playing with some friends online when the music in the game suddenly gets really intense and loud, and you can barely hear what anyone is saying. You can’t open the menu to turn the audio down because you’re in the heat of battle! Again, the Deej is a great solution: turn Discord up, or turn the game audio down with a quick flick of a slider.

Physical mixers, often called volume controls, help mix together disparate audio sources that likely have different output gain settings. Since the earliest sound cards were released, these have been modelled in software, sometimes actually controlling the hardware but usually just modifying the audio stream on the fly. Having a hardware mixer is something not many people think of, but once you have one, you’ll quickly realise how useful it is. If you do anything with live audio on your computer (say, broadcasting to an internet radio station, or streaming video games), a physical mixer is invaluable.

This kit comes with your choice of black, blue, or white fader knobs, and soldering it together should be a quick job for anyone with soldering experience. Even a relative newcomer could do it, with just the Arduino Nano headers and the five slide potentiometers needing to be soldered to the board. The 3D printed case isn’t included, but the STL files are freely available, and this gives you the opportunity to modify it to make it your own!

So far, it looks like it only supports Windows, but as the software is written in Go, it should be possible to port to Linux or Mac without too much hassle. If you’ve ever wanted a simple mixer, this is a great option, and you help support a brand-new Tindie seller!

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