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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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Coin cell batteries power many an embedded electronics project, and are excellent if you need a tiny bit of power in a compact size. Because of their minimal power capacity–3V in the 200 mAh range for CR2032 batteries, and about half that for CR2016s–if you need to push a device to its limits, swapping them out can get inconvenient, expensive, and non-environmentally friendly. As an ingenious alternative, Bobricius offers the coin cell CR2016/CR2032 battery emulator to allow one to sub in USB power instead!

The device is formed from a printed circuit board, with a rectangular area for a Micro USB connector and other circuitry on one end, and two circular sections on the other. The top circle snaps off, revealing a CR2016-sized section that slides into a typical battery holder. The snapped off circle can then be stacked and soldered on to “fatten up” the adapter for use as a CR2032. Meter connection points are also provided for easy current consumption testing.

The trick to how this device works lies in a few dimensions that work together perfectly. The CRxxyy moniker specifies a coin cell’s diameter as xx, i.e. 20mm, while the thickness is noted by yy, i.e. 1.6mm or 3.2mm. A standard PCB is 1.6mm in thickness, and double that is 3.2mm, matching the CR2016 by itself, or the CR2032 when two are stacked together.

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It’s fair to say that Tindie has rich pickings when it comes to decorative PCB badges with a vast variety of eye-catching and wonderful designs out there to choose from. Often these badges are available as kits, and that can be an excellent way for someone to learn to solder through the hole or surface mount components. We’d hazard a guess that not everyone is always at that point in their tinkering career and perhaps they’d like a fully assembled kit, such as this gorgeously happy-looking Gingerbread Man LED badge.

Hailing from the Netherlands, Tech2Wear supplies these cheeky chappies fully assembled and we think they look glorious with their 12 LEDs and chunky white line silkscreen design. They are around 30mm wide by 50mm tall and on the reverse have a badge pin, a battery holder and an on/off switch.  It’s tricky shipping items with batteries these days so you’ll need to supply your own CR2032 coin cell but they are pretty commonly available. There’s no microcontroller, no animation or blinking, but we love the simplicity and cheerfulness of this colourful and cheerful badge!

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While Raspberry Pi single-board computers are generally fantastic, one frustration with them (besides availability) is that the GPIO pins are unlabeled. This can leave you guessing and/or searching for documentation. The Blinky RPi Header from EK ENG takes care of the (labelling) problem as a plug-in diagnostics board, providing not only printed labels, but indicator LEDs to show what each pin is doing.

It’s quite a clever setup–classed as a “headband” by its creator–as it’s too small to be a HAT, and not the same format as a pHAT. The device doesn’t use any pull-up or pull-down resistors, and each LED has its own MOSFET driver, allowing LED current to be supplied from the Pi’s 5V rail. The result is that adding one of these shouldn’t interfere with GPIO functionality, even protocols like I2C and SPI. After all, if your diagnostic tool is causing the problem, then it’s really not useful whatsoever.

The device would be excellent for visualizing the state of different buttons, switches, and whether or not a pin is quickly sending data, helping to identify a problem with minimal poking around. Once things are in a working state, you can then remove the blinky for use on another project, or leave it on as a glorious blinkenlights display!

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I was recently talking to a high school Design and Technology teacher about changes in their curriculum. They mentioned that they had to teach some rudimentary electronics including logic gates and truth tables. They’d been scratching their head a little until they discovered some logic gate example hardware buried in a cupboard in the Physics department! Whilst many schools might have some old CMOS or TTL logic boards lurking somewhere, this LogicShield for the Arduino Uno could be a great option to teach the fundamentals of logic gates and could also open other avenues for exploration.

Simply this is a very clean and well-laid-out Arduino shield that’s supplied fully assembled. The Arduino Uno is not included, but once you’ve grabbed one from your stock you simply insert the shield using the pin headers, flash the provided Arduino sketch to the Arduino and the demonstration device is ready to teach. You can then press buttons to get simple examples of how the input conditions of various logic gates affect the LED output. You could even get students to write up their own truth tables based on their button presses.

I’ve written about logic gate example hardware before on the Tindie blog and searching across Tindie you can find a lot of logic teaching aids. This one caught our eye though as those who are curious can look at how the logic gates are implemented in the accompanying Arduino sketch. Picking apart and learning about operators in the code is a great stepping stone for people who are going on to look at state machines or perhaps use standalone PLCs and even aspire towards programming FPGAs.

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For those of the Jewish faith, Hanukkah is a celebration of the recovery of Jerusalem and the rededication of the Second Temple during the early 2nd century BC. It is observed for 8 nights and days. Each night, typically around sundown, the candle in the centre of the menorah (the shammash or attendant) is used the light the other candles in order, until on the final night all 8 are lit. For the Jewish hacker you want to send good wishes to, check out this Nerdy Hanukkah Card!

It features the menorah, and each LED candle can be lit in turn each evening of Hanukkah, which runs from December 18th to December 26th this year. It also features the dreidel game and will play both O Hannukah and Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel with the piezo speaker. The message can be customized for a particular person, or the default messages of “Happy Hannukah!” and “May Your Candles Burn Long And Bright!” can be used.

It uses a 128×32 OLED screen, an ATtiny85 microcontroller, WS2812 LEDs, piezo buzzer, and is powered by a CR2032 battery. It also comes with a hook so you can hang it on the wall. It can also be powered via USB if you want to save batteries. Traditionally, the candles are lit for at least 30 minutes after the sun goes down, so using USB power probably makes sense if you want to display the menorah at this time.

If you celebrate Hanukkah and want to give it a nerdy touch, this is your ticket!

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PCB Soldering kits come in all shapes and sizes, but few allow you to make a walking–or at least sliding–electronic device in an hour or so. The CAT-CAT Walker kit by Patchr does just that, featuring four bendable legs and a vibration motor for movement, plus an LED to add a bit of style.

When turned on via the included switch, the CAT-CAT scoots around the floor like a brushbot, and its movement can be modified by further shaping its appendages. The device is powered by a coin cell battery that you’ll need to provide, which is held on by an included retainer clip.

It’s quite a stylish little PCB design, manufactured with a white solder mask, and includes various decorations to give it a fun robotic/sci-fi look. While the reference may or may not be immediately apparent, the CAT-CAT designation is a fun play on Star Wars’ doglike AT-AT walkers.

The kit is intended to be assembled by those who have some experience with soldering. Fantastic assembly directions are available; however, those that are relatively new may be able to follow along as well. Given the upcoming holiday season, it looks like a fantastic stocking stuffer for any technically curious people in your orbit!

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I’m a southpaw. It mostly goes unnoticed these days but when I was younger I used to get annoyed at the right-handedness of the world. I was truly awful with scissors and would constantly be told off for leaving things the wrong way round! I never really considered the impact on me when gaming, but perhaps I should have! This Goofy Foot NES controller PCB essentially allows you to create a perfectly left-handed NES controller. When the controller is upside down, the D-Pad and buttons are re-mapped to work correctly.

Apparently, this isn’t only desirable for the true left-handed retro gamer. It’s a technique used competitively by professional and amateur Tetris players who prefer the D-Pad to be in the right hand. Digging deeper into the product description from EricIcx they actually offer a range of modifications so you can get the NES controller you require. They offer modifications to vintage controllers and modern aftermarket clones. They are also replacing the rubber button membranes and modifying them to give the best and fastest response. They also offer a range of different key bindings with suggestions as to why they might be beneficial for different player styles and games.

There’s such a level of detail in the product description; you can tell by reading it that EricIcx is really dedicated to getting the best out of this classic controller design which is heartwarming to see!

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Being of an era to remember the first wave of Tamagotchi I always have a warm nostalgia for virtual pet projects. It’s great to see that the concept lives on and moves from platform to platform in the hardware hacking community. This DIY Tamagotchi kit is centred around an ESP8266 connected to a small OLED screen and a few momentary press buttons to give you the vital inputs to keep your virtual pet alive!

Using a Wemos Mini D1 at the heart of the project you’ll need to do a little soldering and some assembly of M2 standoffs to get the mechanical build completed. The kit ships with a sample PlatformIO project and you’ll need to download and install the PlatformIO IDE to then compile and build the software to flash to the board. The project is based on the “ArduinoGotchi” project, which originally used an Arduino Uno, but has been ported over to the ESP8266 environment.

Power is supplied via a micro USB socket and we’re confident this would run for a long time off a USB power bank, although we think it would be a simple and fun project to get this up and running using a single LiPo cell and a boost converter.

There’s more detail over on the Github repository for the project and you can also check in on the project at its Hackaday.io page.

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Macro pads are a fun, superb way to optimize your computer-using experience. Whether you’re using a numpad in addition to your keyboard, or you’ve got a Stream Deck to improve those all-day Zoom calls, there are a number of pre-built and designed devices out there for you to use. But, what if you’re looking for a bespoke solution? What if you want to play around with making your own maco pad, including its case and software functionality? If that’s the case, the PICO DEV M3 is here to give you an encoder to start playing with.

The macro pad features a magnetic rotary encoder with a base resolution of 36 steps that can be extended to 36,000 steps per resolution, giving you all the flexibility and resolution scaling for just about any application. There is also a ball bearing in the rotary encoder, giving the encoder an exceptionally smooth-feeling motion. The development board itself is based around the RP2040 chip, with 19 GPIO pins, a USB-C connector, and all the communication breakouts that are built into the RP2040. The encoder kit also comes with a 3D printable case, with the design files available online and 18 addressable RGB LEDs on board.

You’re going to want to place an order soon for this development board, quantities are getting low! The board comes from Ahmsville Labs, located in Ikorodu, Nigeria. They have a host of other macro keys and pads available, so if you’re shopping for something with a different look or functionality, visit their store to see what else they have available!

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