Tindie

USB Type-C, or simply USB-C, is an interesting beast. On the one hand, the fact that it’s reversible is amazing when compared to its predecessors, and USB-C’s potential data transfer speeds, special modes, and power capabilities make it appear to be the cable to take us into the future. On the other hand, when you pick up this type of cable, you don’t always know its specifications, or if it’s still working as intended. To test all 24 possible USB-C connections, the C2C caberQU by The current stuff shows the status with a series of indicator LEDs.

The device is powered by an included CR3032 battery, and the indicator LEDs simply light up when a USB-C to USB-C cable is plugged in. 25 lights in total are used, including a shield connection LED. This allows it to test pin combinations for USB 2.x and 3.x, along with other modes as needed. While it will test what’s connected, given the broad scope of USB-C, it can’t tell you exactly how a cable is used. The listing suggests checking Wikipedia for more info, or you can delve into the actual USB-C spec here.

You can see the device in action in the video below, lighting up the board’s indicator LEDs. It’s especially interesting to see how the shield connects before everything else, and amazing to see a visual representation of what’s going on inside these cables.

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There are heaps of LED wearables to be found across the Tindie marketplace and often it takes an additional feature, or a particularly pleasing design to make something stand out. The “Sound Reactive” description grabbed our attention as the extra feature, making this beautiful Sound Reactive LED Swallowtail Butterfly Clip stand out.

This lovely butterfly design is supplied fully assembled and features 14 multicoloured LEDs affixed to the pleasing purple PCB. You can use the two onboard buttons to adjust the brightness of the LEDs and to switch between 5 different preset patterns. The LEDs react to sound and will pulse in time to any music present, perfect for winter parties!

Power is supplied via 2 CR2032 batteries which are commonly available. Running at full brightness the batteries will run for around 4 hours and then the butterfly switches into a “reduced colour” mode so that you can sparkle for longer! There’s a simple on/off switch on board so you can choose when to deploy your LED bling!

Whilst the image above shows this in use as a hair clip there’s no reason that this can’t be attached to any garment or costume in your wardrobe and we think you’ll cut quite the dash wherever you wear this!

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There are few communication protocols in the world of electronics more ubiquitous than I2C and SPI. Almost every single project of mine uses one or the other, and it is superb for a number of purposes, like cutting down on the number of pins required, being able to piggy-back multiple sensors onto a single line, and transmitting data over wired connections without the need to develop your own checksums and the like. One major restriction though has always been how far you can run those wires which carry the communication signal. But with the newly released JARViE Extender, you can now send those signals over twisted pair cables up to 150ft!

The board uses the TI P82B715 buffer IC to be able to transmit I2C, SPI, or GPIO signals over cable and includes an RJ45 connector onboard to make hookup a breeze. The board can also handle bi-directional data transfers and has a dual bi-directional unity-voltage-gain buffer that doesn’t require external direction control, keeping it simple to use. And be sure to visit the product page and see the great work the maker did to document and verify the signal transmission integrity along a variety of lengths of cable. You can even see a live demo and breakdown of the communication board below!

This board is offered by JARViE, based in the United States. Their Tindie store has a number of other smart home and IoT products, like this Mini Powerline Communications board, which lets you communicate between different boards over AC or DC power lines.

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I’ve recently gotten into indoor plants. And with holiday travel plans looming, I realize that I may have gone a bit overboard and don’t quite have a plan for keeping all my new photosynthesizing friends watered while I’m away. But then, like a lighthouse through the fog banks, I spotted the Droplet Smart Irrigation board, and now my plants will be safe and well cared for while I fly home!

The board brings together all the features one could need for remote plant monitoring and watering services. Based on the ESP32, the board is compatible with Home Assistant and ESPHome, and can control a litany of peripherals. You have the option of the main board or picking up both the main board and expansion board. The main board gives you 5 micropump outlets for a controlled watering supply, 5 soil moisture sensor inputs, buttons for manual water pump activation, a built-in DS18B20 temperature sensor, and a built-in buzzer. If you opt to include the expansion board, you’ll get even more with pins for 8 relays to control lighting setups, and GPIO pins a-plenty to add as many sensors as the heart desires.

This board comes from Priceless Toolkit and they have shared plenty of documentation for the main board and expansion kit here on their Github.

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It would be fair to say that we feature a lot of excellent Tindie products and kits that require some soldering. It’s perhaps easy to forget that not everyone has taken the plunge and learnt how to solder. Of course, we’d thoroughly recommend that everyone should learn to solder, but it’s nice to see electronic kits that can be made using other techniques. This no-solder, wire-wrapping beautiful snowflake kit fits the bill perfectly!

First of all, let’s not overlook the lovely laser-cut chassis. Made from MDF, it’s gloriously engraved with a circuit board trace motive that looks fabulous. There are six flashing RGB LEDs which are inserted into neat laser-cut holes at the end of each branch of the snowflake. On the reverse, you use an older electronics production technique known as wire wrapping to make the connections. It’s pretty straightforward and the supplied 30AWG wires are wrapped around the LED component leads and patched into the power supply. Power is delivered from a small CR2032 coin cell in a switched holder. Not everyone has fine enough wire strippers to work with 30AWG wires and as such the thoughtful crew at Alpenglow Industries have you covered with a pre-stripped wire kit option!

Once patched together this beautiful festive circuit will run for around 15 hours and can be hung as a decoration; we think it’s a tree topper for sure!

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An ePaper display can be a fantastic solution when you need to show static or slowly changing information. Since this type of display uses power only when swapping states, they can be great for low-power embedded designs. At the same time, it’s a bit of a niche technology, and it’s not always clear how to get started with it. As a solution for your embedded sensor and wireless interface challenges, Catnip Electronics is offering the Paper WiFi Arduino-compatible display package.

The device features a 2.13″ ePaper display with a resolution of 212 x 104 pixels and an ESP32C3 module for WiFi/BLE communication and onboard processing. The device can interface with other electronics via I2C and UART, and features two broken-out GPIO pins for further interface and control. Additionally, the device has an onboard temperature and humidity sensor. So if you think you might have a use for it in the future, but a connected environmental display would be somewhat useful right now, it’s got you covered.

Hardware and firmware are both open source, and available on GitHub. The firmware is ready for your use and modification, taking care of WiFi provisioning and onboard sensor usage. Impressively, the device draws only .038mA of current in deep sleep, allowing it to last for years on 2xAA batteries.

If you’d like to know more about this product’s origin, I did an interview with Catnip Electronics, AKA Albertas Mickėnas, a few years ago!

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USB, or Universal Serial Bus, was a rather fantastic idea when it was released in the 1990s. No longer would we need a separate serial port, parallel port, game port, PS/2 port, etc. We could simply pug in one type of port anywhere, and it would do the job. The story, as we all know, is a bit more complicated. All that being said, if you want to break out lines from the latest USB form factor–USB type C–then Solder Party’s USB Type-C Plug Breakout has you covered.

This USB-C PCB exposes GND, VBUS, CC, D+, D-, and VCONN in a nice row, for easy access to USB 2.0 pins. The CC pin is pulled to ground via a 5.1k resistor, identifying it as a downstream port, though this can be changed as needed with a bit of soldering work.

The device includes an unsoldered pin header for breadboard work or other attachments but is otherwise assembled. The PCB features a pair of holes on either side of the plug, which could come in handy for mounting duties.

Of course, USB-C is a rather broad subject, and if you’d like to know more you can check out this application note, or the full (373 pages) specification if you’ve got some time on your hands. Documentation and design files are also linked in the product listing, and if you need access to USB 3.0 pins, then you may wish to check out Solder Party’s USB-C 3.0 breakout.

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The holidays are fast approaching and before the guests arrive and the stockings are stuffed, now is the perfect time to get the finishing touches and gifts for loved ones! Below are a few of our favorite listings to inspire and motivate that last-minute shopping.

Light-up Wreath Earrings

Nothing builds the holiday spirit like over-the-top earrings, and these Light-Up Wreaths are the perfect accessory for the season! These earrings pay homage to an oft under-appreciated piece of decor, and offer a number of customization options like the color of the wreath and the LEDs themselves! They come pre-assembled and just need coin-cell batteries to run. The makers, California STEAM, ship from the United States with multiple options for delivery speed.

Bee Merry Christmas Ornament

The Bee Merry ornament is perfect for the burnt-out corporate worker in your life who dreams of a tiny cottage in the woods with their own beekeeping options. Plus, giving ornaments is a fantastic idea for the new adults in your family! My own family has a tradition of giving Christmas decor to the newly-minted adults living in their first apartments and homes, and it’s always a smash hit.

The ornament features 6 RGB LEDs, mounted backward to shine through the translucent PCB, and can be bought as a kit or fully assembled. Made by Snurkle Engineering, this ornament ships from the United States and offers 2-day Priority mailing options.

Nerdy Hanukkah Card

With Hanukkah starting later this year, now is the perfect time to snap up this Nerdy Hanukkah Card for those who celebrate in your life! The onboard piezo speaker plays “Hanukkah O Hanukkah” and “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel”, and the board offers two different modes. Menorah mode lets you light the LED candle each night and Dreidel mode lets you spin a virtual dreidel, giving you outputs of “nun”, “gimel”, “hey” and “shin”. Additionally, you can have the messages displayed on the OLED customized by the seller, MakeItHackin, who ships from the United States.

Festive Palm Tree Ornament

As someone who lives in warmer climates, a white Christmas is never in the cards for me, but a festively decorated palm tree is everywhere I turn my head! So this Festive Palm Tree ornament speaks to me on many levels, especially with the more “old-fashioned” wiring method used to assemble the kit. The 6 self-flashing RGB LEDs push through the laser-cut board and are powered by 1 CR2032 battery, but the design means you can substitute any power source you like easily! Undeniably, Alpenglow Industries are one of the best on the Christmas electronics kit market, and if palm trees aren’t your style, they have another option for you.

Merry Krampus Soldering Challenge

Another brilliant offering from Alpenglow Industries is their Krampus Soldering Challenge. Based on an ATTiny4, this board can be reprogrammed, but also comes preprogrammed with light-up eyes and tongue. The ornament is also purchasable in a couple of different options, either pre-assembled or just the PCB, or if you’re interested in a challenge, the Hacker Challenge lets you assemble the ornament yourself! Alpenglow Industries is based in California and offers a couple of different shipping options through USPS.

PCB Christmas Earrings

If more subtle holiday earrings are more your style, these PCB Christmas earrings are perfect. The tree PCBs are each powered by a CR1620 coin cell battery and have 9 LEDs controlled by an ATTiny microcontroller. The clever masking and traces make the adorable design of the earrings. Made by Seriousengineering in Poland, these ship across Europe via DHL!

Das Tannenbäumchen (LED Christmas Tree)

When the famous German Christmas markets meet the Shenzhen tech markets, you get this lovely RGB LED Tannenbäumchen (also called a Christmas tree!). The PCB is programmable over UART and can be powered over USB-C or battery. There are 24 brightly shining RGBW LEDs onboard, with 15 pre-programmed patterns and a potentiometer to control LED brightness. The assembled tree includes a satin acrylic front face, adding a tasteful piece of light diffusion. This ships from Germany from the L²ElectronDesignStore, perfect for European shoppers.

As always with last-minute online shopping, be mindful of where you’re ordering from and take into account potential delays with whatever postal service the store is using!

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When I started reading about this Speaker Protection module and the various chips it can replace, I had an “Aha!” moment. I have a fairly decent Denon DRA-295 amplifier from the early 2000s, and when it first turns on there is a pause of a few seconds before an audible click can be heard. This click is a relay that disconnects the speaker outputs from the primary amplifier circuit. I had never really thought about it before, but when you turn on older hi-fi amplifiers you occasionally get transient noise on the speakers. This isn’t great, especially if it has a large DC offset or suddenly puts too much power into your speakers.

So at some point, amplifier manufacturers started adding protection chips that would wait for the power supply to stabilize, and check for no overvoltage or other issues on the amplifier output before energizing the relay and enabling output. This circuit can also respond quickly enough to save your speakers if the amplifier circuit gets damaged and shorts the speaker output to the supply rails, for example. This would quickly result in the speaker coils overheating and self-destructing!

However, the protection chips have been known to fail and some amplifiers never included them in the first place, so you can grab this module to add protection. This module is essentially a replica of the TA7317 protection chip that was used in many amplifiers, including high-end amps from Nakamichi. So in order to use it, you just need an external relay and a couple capacitors and resistors. Pretty easy to install, and a great way to protect your hi-fi speakers from damage.

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I wish I still had my old Mac Plus, because this great little ATX converter kit would have been the perfect way to get it up and running again. I ended up giving it away to a Mac enthusiast group because I didn’t have the time to debug and repair the built-in power supply, which is apparently somewhat unreliable with age.

ATX power supplies nowadays are generally exceptionally well-made. You can get a quality, power-efficient supply capable of sourcing hundreds of amps for under $100. The economy of scale is really quite amazing. So it’s definitely worth finding a way to use these power supplies to repair vintage equipment, especially as they have built-in overvoltage, overcurrent, undervoltage etc. protections. This makes them safe to use — if an output is shorted, it won’t even enable the output, which can save you a lot of grief!

As you can see, dekuNukem shows it being used with one of the new PicoATX supplies. If you’ve never seen these before, they are tiny boards that can usually supply up to 150W when powered from a 12V input. They provide all the standard ATX voltage rails, and have similar protection circuits. But this board can work with any ATX supply, you just have to route the cables and it might be a little bit less clean-looking.

So if you’re restoring an old Mac 128k/512k/Plus, check this out! dekuNukem also has a separate ATX converter that can be adapted to almost any vintage system — a great way to bring many vintage machines back to life!

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