Tindie

There are some projects where you get so deep in the weeds, that there is precisely one tool that can dig you out of the pits of despair. Some of the most frustrating things to work through are scenarios with bricked microcontrollers, or when you’re exploring frequency responses in precise circuitry, and you need signal generation capabilities that are a step beyond what your two-probe benchtop signal generator can provide. That’s why it is a brilliant idea to go ahead and do your future self a favor and add the Precision Clock Generator to your electronics toolbag.

This clock generator can output up to three different clock outputs, from 2.5KHz up to 100MHz if you need all three, and up to a 225MHz signal if you just need one output. The board has everything you need: a simple yet comprehensive display, and Arduino IDE capability since it has an STM32 Cortex M3 microcontroller for a brain. Without even having to connect it to the Arduino IDE, you can set all 3 clocks to do frequency sweeps, so let your imagination run wild with what can be done when the board is given a bespoke program! And with the clock signals themselves, you also have four drive strength level options, for those more sensitive projects.

This magnificent tool comes from Pandauino, based in Perpignan, France, and they offer plenty of documentation to help you get the most from your Precision Clock Generator. This isn’t the only clever product they offer, be sure to keep an eye out for when their upgrade to the Arduino Nano comes back in stock as well!

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Take the mundane into the fast lane with this gloriously nerdy counting device! Whether you need to keep track of your board game scores, tally up prices, or perhaps even count the number of times your cat starts zooming around the house – this charming device makes any task much more enjoyable!

Rǒta is a tool designed for counting things in style. It features beautiful vintage electronic components, including three handmade nixie tubes from the USSR and a rotary dial. Packed with features, this piece of kit has been lovingly prototyped and developed over three iterations by Architeuthis Flux. This hard work has created a device that works around the clock to fulfil your counting needs. Whilst it is capable of the essential addition, it has a bunch of extra modes, including tracking golf scores or working as a stopwatch.

The hardware itself is beautiful! Featuring a carefully crafted black PCB and well-chosen components, this device really looks the part. It can be delivered either fully assembled or in a DIY kit, allowing you to decide precisely how much work you want to put in before use. Why not spend an evening refining your soldering skills, knowing that you’ll have built this unique and fascinating device?

Architeuthis Flux, an independent electronics manufacturer based out of the United States, intend to share their ideas with the world. They are an enthusiastic creator whose mind is often filled with ideas for new products, particularly ones using vintage displays, and are also open to custom electronics work!

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The Makey Makey has been a stalwart board for years that guaranteed fun in whatever way you used it. It can turn almost anything into a keyboard or HID input, using conductivity and closed-loop circuitry to convert tapping a carrot into a music note, a video game input, or to trigger an action on your computer. One of my favourite demos is this music video playing “Teardrop” by Massive Attack on a bunch of fruit and vegetables. (Bonus points if you can name the show that uses this song as its theme!) However, Makey Makey was initially released during the early 2010s and is in sore need of an update for the modern age. Luckily for us, the McPlay ESP32 Makey Makey is here to answer that call!

The main improvement is swapping the original ATMega32u4 for an ESP32-S2, bringing features like 2.4 GHz WiFi, Bluetooth, and easy autodetection on your computer as an “ESP32 S2 HID”. And even better, the micro-USB is upgraded to a USB-C. Long gone are the days of digging through your cable drawer for the fabled micro-USB; instead, you can just use a USB-C cable that has become a standard in our lives. With the inclusion of onboard LEDs on the McPlay, diagnostics and checking that your fruit-of-choice is conductive enough is a breeze.

The documentation for the McPlay is all shared on Github, and the project is open-source with the Gerber files, schematic, and Arduino sketches available. This project comes from Gerai Cerdas, based in Banten, Indonesia, and they have a number of other ESP32-based projects in their store for you to take a look at as well!

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Halloween is right around the corner, and Tindie once again has all the spooky decorations and wearables you need! From earrings to pins to props, the community has always impressed us with their awesome work.

Fresh off the press are these amazing spiderweb earrings that are available in three different colours — Toxic Green (pictured), Ice Blue, and Orange. With over 50 hours of run time from a pair of 2032 batteries, these shine brightly enough to be seen during the day, but not so brightly as to blind people at your midnight Halloween party. These earrings are so well-designed, with the resistors blending into the silkscreen, looking like tiny little bugs caught in the web!

If earrings aren’t your thing, then this Michael Myers wearable badge is sure to make you stand out! A CR2032 powers his glowing red eyes, and a simple pin makes it easy to attach to your costume. The silkscreen looks great and the red glow is very creepy!

To really creep out your friends, check out this Uncanny Eye pendant. An ESP8266 and TFT display power the eye… which is constantly moving… plotting… watching! It’s very unsettling. The maker has even released all the design files if you want to 3D print and build your own! Open hardware for the win.

If you’re curious about what else we have in stock for Halloween, just check out our Halloween listings! There are all sorts of creepy crawlies to delight and impress your friends and liven up your Halloween parties — take a look and let us know which ones you like best!

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With the passage of time, it gets harder to find peripherals for your vintage computer needs. So increasingly we look to other solutions to keep our favourite tech in use. The RetroMouse, an open-source USB adaptor, converts any PS2 optical mouse to an Amiga/Commodore compatible one. This should give you access to heaps of cheap, available mouse options.

Currently, the RetroMouse adaptor is compatible with Amiga and Commodore 64 systems with the adaptor auto-detecting which type of machine it is connected to. C0pperdragon indicates that they are working on adding Atari ST compatibility in the future.

It’s fully open-source hardware with the schematic and PCB layouts available in KiCAD format. You can tinker with the firmware on the ATtiny1604 using the Arduino IDE and the megaTinyCore bootloader. There is more information over on the RetroMouse Github repository, including a mention of a useful function! If you want to emulate 2 paddle inputs, as if perhaps playing a game of Arkanoid, you can enter this mode by holding down the right mouse button and clicking the left mouse button 5 times! You can return to the standard mode by repeating the action with 6 mouse clicks. We love this project and are constantly inspired by the work the Tindie community puts into keeping these retro computer systems useful and functional!

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Speech is complex in software. Your Alexa or Google Home has to utilize thousands of remote servers with giant cloud infrastructure to be able to parse and respond to our requests, and that kind of backend tends to be out of budget for most of my own projects. However, we’ve had speech synthesis for decades now. Do you remember the Speak and Spell toy from the 70s? It had a Texas Instruments TMS5100 LCP (Linear Predictive Coding) chip inside, utilizing some shift registers and noise generators to turn single letters into spoken words. While it may be difficult to get your hands on these heirlooms nowadays to see the effect yourself, the Arduino Talkie Speech Amplifier Shield lets you use that same nostalgic effects through open-source libraries on any ESP32 board.

This shield was developed to sit right on top of the ESP32 TinyPICO, though with some clever wiring it can work with any ESP32 board! The shield features Texas Instrument’s LM4875 chip, meaning you’ve got a built-in DAC amplifier that can feed right into any 8W speaker you connect via the screw terminals. And to unlock the full potential of this shield, the open-source Arduino Talkie library is available to generate a similar effect as the original TMS5100 chip. With the pages of documentation on the library repo and the seller’s board documentation page, getting started is a breeze!

This beautifully-documented board comes from DebinixTeam, based in Stockholm, Sweden. And if you’ve got a couple of different versions of ESP32 development boards you’d like to try this shield with, they also have an ESP32 Adapter Board you can add to your purchase to make life a bit easier.

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Optical flow sensing is an amazing technology that is utilized in all manner of moving systems but has found a more natural home in un-crewed aerial vehicle projects. This PMW3901MB Optical Flow Sensor breakout board aims to make it simple to incorporate optical flow sensing into your next project.

So what does it do? Well in simple terms it’s an image sensor connected to an onboard ASIC that compares the current image to the last image and calculates a difference between them in the X and Y axis. If you use an optical flow sensor like this in conjunction with a sensor that can sense the distance you are above the image surface you can then really accurately track positional changes of your vehicle. Its most common application is reducing lateral drift in multi-rotor systems in combination with a barometer to report and hold the vertical position. The successive changes in delta x and delta y can be processed and a correction can be applied by a flight-controlling MCU to maintain a fixed position.

This breakout board has some great features and it certainly wouldn’t be limited to just things that fly. The form factor not only allows it to be used on a breadboard but also is designed to be able to be mounted directly onto the pins of a Teensy board. There’s an API for Arduino with a well-written example sketch. Lastly, this is a shared project on OSHpark so if you want to build your own breakout it’s super easy to order the PCBs.

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The PDTricker Fast Charge Deception Tool by Muse Lab connects to a USB-C PD source, and can produce voltages on an output USB-C port of 5, 9, 12, 15, and 20V. Voltage selections are made via an onboard button, and indicated by a series of LEDs. Code that runs it is available on GitHub, along with the schematic if you’d like to examine how it works. It’s based on the CH224K chip, though the datasheet there appears to be in Chinese.

One might understandably be nervous about using a USB-C to USB-C “tricker” inline with expensive electronics, and/o or leaving it unattended. Where it would seem to shine, however, would be for test applications, where you don’t want to drag out a full featured DC power supply, and a 5/9/12/15/20V source would be sufficient. For this purpose, the device can be ordered with a USB-C alligator clip cable, allowing you to power up that motor (or other thing) that you want to test at your desk with an Arduino.

Impressively, the device is able to deliver 5A at 20V, though this will of course depend on your power supply. It can also has a pair of VOUT/GND through holes, on which you can solder your own leads if you prefer to forgo the USB-C output altogether.

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This board is more than just a carrier board for an ESP-01. It also contains a CH340C USB-to-serial chip for communicating with and programming the ESP8266, as well as charging circuitry to charge and regulate a lithium battery pack! While powered externally, the USB-to-serial connection is active and everything is powered from the external supply. However, if the external supply fails or is removed, it instantly switches over to powering everything from the attached battery pack.

The board has a constant 5V out for strips that you want to be powered all the time. It also has a connection from the ESP-01 so you can control the LEDs via PWM or an external transistor. An N-channel MOSFET like an IRLB8721 would be a great way to control large numbers of LEDs with this board! An onboard 3.3V regulator is also included to power the ESP-01 correctly.

Potential applications include emergency lighting for signage. Another application that comes to mind is a remotely-controlled ON AIR sign for podcasters and streamers! The design files are freely available, so you can easily hack the board to fit whatever application you have in mind.

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While I write for Tindie, I also sell things on the JC Devices store. My most successful product is the EZ Fan2 board, which is meant to help control a simple fan (or any other small load) with Raspberry Pi devices and other logic-level inputs.

I test every board, and up until quite recently, this meant rearranging wires on an actual Raspberry Pi board to ensure it actually powered a fan. This isn’t that difficult, but doing this procedure over and over can be a hassle. So I did what any enterprising hacker would do, and made my own test jig!

The resulting device, as outlined in the video below, could be considered a straightforward bed of nails tester, with three pogo pins at the input through holes, and two at the output where the load (fan) would nominally go. A simple ATtiny board, meant to mount a pair of EZ Fan2s, runs a modified blink sketch so that when the device under test (DUT) hits the pogo pins, it blinks the LED.

While one might argue that I likely spent more time on it than it will ultimately save, it makes me happy every time I use it. Perhaps the video will inspire ideas for your testing and/or manufacturing process. If you have a cool Tindie test jig, we’d love to hear about it. Ping us on Twitter @Tindie, or you can find me @JeremySCook.

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