Tindie

Tindie is an excellent resource to find niche electronics to help solve a specific need or problem. However, if what you find is out of stock and can’t actually be purchased, it does you little good. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to ensure that what comes up via search is in stock.

Go to Tindie.com and type in what you would like to find. I’ve demonstrated below with the words “pogo pin.” As shown, you get 86 products, which seems awesome. Clicking through, however, a number of them are out of stock as of this writing.

To filter things down to in stock items only, look at the bottom left of your browser screen, and you’ll find a filter option for “In Stock.” Click on this, and the list gets chiseled down to 50 products, all of which are ready to ship. You can also filter by price, which could be quite helpful as well.

Note that this technique doesn’t indicate whether a seller lists shipping rates to your country–though you can always put in a request. It does account for sellers being on vacation, which happens from time to time.

As for where I got the idea to search for “pogo pin,” making sure things were in stock for this AVR ICSP Pogo Pin Adapter Options post was a small challenge. Now that I know where to click, such research shouldn’t be an issue in the future!

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DEF CON 30 has come and gone this year, and wow — there were some incredibly talented and passionate folks there. Being both an important anniversary for the event and the first full-scale gathering since the beginning of the pandemic, people brought a lot of impressive projects and skills to Las Vegas. 

This was my first time at DEF CON, and between the talks, the villages, the vendors, and the people: to say there is something for everyone is an understatement. But one thing that made it easy to find my fellow hardware peeps was looking for fun and unique badges that people wore alongside their official DC30 one. One look around the room is all it took for me to find anyone with a litany of LEDs around their neck. Below are just a few of my favorite badges from this year’s #badgelife at DEF CON 30.

The Official DEF CON 30 Badge

First and foremost, I want to gush over the official badge. With the supply chain issues plaguing many electronics manufacturers, the dynamic duo at @theMKFactor pulled a delightful rabbit out of the hat with this badge. Featuring a capacitive touch keyboard, speaker, microphone, and some incredible PCB artwork, the conference halls were filled with music all weekend. The badge’s puzzle immediately captured my attention, and my time was split between figuring out how to play songs and call friends with this little keyboard. 

The badge has an RP2040 chip at its heart, and a curved PCB insert as the face that holds the pressure-connected speaker in place. I’ve never seen a PCB-based face done this way and I thought it was super creative. These badges were fun and whimsical and felt like the hacker’s equivalent of handing out recorders to a classroom of fifth graders (for better or for worse!).

The Unofficial Badges

One badge that I had my eye out for was TwinkleTwinkie’s Clock badge. Featuring everyone’s favorite maybe-bear-maybe-cat creature, it tells you the time and, having experienced it firsthand, I can confirm- is very fuzzy. 

Their Tindie store is currently on a break (understandably!) but keep an eye out for when they return on August 22nd to see if they have any Clock badges still for sale!

An unexpected but certainly popular badge coveted by all was the Tron-inspired badge made by the folks at Ironwood Cyber. 

Only offered through acts of goodwill and random drops announced on Twitter, this badge had people sprinting all around the conference to get their hands on one. The bare copper plating was touch-sensitive, causing one of the many different operating modes to activate every time it was in your hands. The LED diffusion on the sides was tastefully done with a translucent 3D printed insert used to give the badge its dimension.

This badge caught my eye every single time someone walked by with it on. Made by Hexum064, it’s the latest iteration in a project series he calls the “Big [Censored] Badge”. This year’s Daft Punk-inspired board involved three stacks of PCBs, two 3W speakers to pump out those electronic beats, and over 500 addressable LEDs. There’s a project log at Hackaday if you’re looking for more details. With an understandably limited run of these badges, they went fast and were a head-turner all weekend long.

Simple Add-Ons (SAOs)

A couple of beautifully silk-screened SAOs come from Nerfhammer. Most of their badges have a fun interactivity component to them, like Skully, pictured below, with an accelerometer that tells the LEDs to flicker out like a candle. Another SAO features a tap sensor to control an LED to mimic the beating of a heart. They have some available on their Tindie store, including a number of the most popular ones they had this year at DEF CON.

The Artful Joker SAO caught my eye, with just how clean and timeless its design is. It reminds me of a blend of graffiti and old-timey comic book artwork; and with the red eyes and the blue teardrop animation on the face, it was a beautiful compliment to the white-and-black artwork of the official badges. 

This one was made by the team at Deepnet.store, who told me they’d be setting up a Tindie store very soon. If you need this for your next badge, keep an eye out for that release!

This SAO almost slipped right past me until a kind soul in the Hardware Hacking Village offered me a demo. 

Yes. That is a fully-functional port of Doom. On an SAO. It can actually be played using the push buttons on the official DEF CON 30 badge, or you can have it running in demo mode. Weird Doom ports were quite popular this year (as they should be!) with one talk about jailbreaking John Deere tractors featuring a Doom port running on the screen.

Hardware Hacking Village

If you’ve never been to a DEF CON before, one of the most popular elements is the presence of the villages. My personal favorite is the Hardware Hacking Village, which was filled with soldering irons, pet projects, a Rube Goldberg machine, and other lovers-of-hardware. This year they offered not only a home for all the hardware fans but also helped many conference-goers ruggedize or repair their official badges after some grounding problems popped up during their wear. 

A lot of these badges and SAOs are available on Tindie if you couldn’t make it out to Nevada this year or just didn’t manage to find the seller in the huge crowd of hackers this year. Be sure to look around Tindie and see what you can still score, even if Hacker Summer Camp is over this year. 

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As an amateur radio operator (and even well before that) I’ve always had a soft spot for radio. It’s such an amazing technology, and I’ve always had various radios and radio kits around. This DSP-based Dual Band AM/FM Radio is a very nifty little project that explores the digital realm of modern radio.

The project is based around the Skyworks (formerly Silicon Labs) SI4730 chip. This chip integrates everything needed for a modern radio, from the front-end amplifier and mixer blocks to the DSP decoder and digital/analog audio outputs. It’s pretty incredible that a QFN20 chip can contain an entire AM/FM radio when in the not-too-distant past it required many discrete semiconductors, op-amps, mixers, variable capacitors, and more. Now you get very high-quality audio, all controlled via either I2C or SPI-like interfaces.

This kit takes that chip and pairs it with a rotary encoder & buttons, a 0.96″ OLED screen, and external antenna and speaker connections. The speaker output has an LM386 amplifier providing up to 1W of output, which is plenty for a small system like this. The system also uses an ATmega328P, so you can easily modify the firmware to explore all the features of the Si4730.

If you want to explore the world of short- and longwave, JasonKits also sells a similar kit based around the Si4375 Quad Band AM/FM/SW/LW chip. The latest revision has some fancy new features, including a 17dB pre-amp on the shortwave input, allowing weaker stations to be tuned in more reliably.

Dive into the world of digital radio with one of these awesome kits!

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When you start out in the world of AVR microcontrollers, more than likely you connect a USB cable into some flavor of Arduino to transfer instructions. This paradigm can be sufficient for quite some time–years even–but at some point you’ll likely progress into the world of in-circuit serial programming via solder-on headers.

Plugging things in to headers works well, but what if your device has a pinout on the board but no actual pins? You could solder on headers for programming, but this adds space and time to a project. Another quicker option is to use a pogo pin header arrangement.

These aptly-named pogo pins contract under pressure, and extend to fill connection gaps. When properly arranged and applied to circuit board connections, pogo pins can make electrical contact for the few seconds needed for programming. You’re then ready to move on to the next thing immediately, making programming one device more convenient, and programming a large number of devices practical.

Pogo pins come in a variety of shapes and sizes; of course, you’ll need a jig to help get the required pogo pins in place. Naturally, Tindie sellers have a few solutions that may work perfectly for your AVR ICSP programming needs:

AVR ISP Pogo Adapter Kit: Geppetto Electronics

By far the most popular and well-reviewed adapter on this list is Geppetto Electronics’s AVR ISP Pogo Adapter kit, featuring six nicely labelled ICSP pins in the classic AVR .1in 2×3 header arrangement. The device is an arrangement of two identical circuit boards, which hold the pogo pins in place via solder connections. Connections are broken out to a 90º 2×3 connector on the back.

In-Line Programmer: Nico

This device by Nico is quite simple, breaking out the 6 pogo pins and connectors in-line with each other. This means that alignment-wise it functions in the same manner as plugging into a connector soldered onto the board.

Surface-Mount Pattern Programmer: Alpenglow

Alpenglow’s ISP Pogo Adapter Kit has an unusual spacing arrangement, adapted for a surface-mount programming header footprint. Each of the two rows of pins are spaced at .1in center-to-center, and the rows themselves are spaced .3in from each other. It’s a nice device for unpopulated surface-mount headers, but it won’t work for traditional ISP spacing.

I may or may not have neglected to read the full description, and ordered them for the wrong application. So don’t make the same mistake. At the same time, the programmers that theoretically arrived were brilliantly packaged and labelled with nice instructions.

1.27mm Spacing Programmer: PDEngineering

PDEngineering sells an ISP programmer with a 1.27mm 2×3 pin arrangement (i.e. .05in spacing). A specialized tool for this space saving header arrangement. Many development kits for Microchip ARM processors use this type of connector. Just read the description to be sure you’re getting what you need!

Round Programmer: JasonKits

JasonKits 5cm diameter round pogo programmer features accommodations for both a 6 and 10-pin input AVRISP connection. The device is designed to be easy to hold, though depending on what you’re programming, you may want to check for any potential clearance issues.

In-Line Kit: JC Devices

It’s a bit of a long story, but in my preliminary work for what eventually became this article, I wasn’t immediately able to find what I wanted in a pogo pin adapter. So I made my own ICSP programming jig, and put it up on my store, JC Devices. What I like about it is that it fixtures everything in-line like the second product on this list, using a pair of very small PCBs. There’s an option to buy a 3D-printed jig to help put them together, or you can print the jig yourself, which–in my admittedly biased opinion–I thought was pretty clever.

ICSP Adapters: Lots of Options… Or Make Your Own!

So if you want a way to perform in-circuit serial programming, Tindie sellers have a variety of options available. And if you don’t see what you want, the beauty of our online marketplace is that you can design your own version, then list it to see if it works for anyone else!

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There are lots of soldering kits out there for you to learn the basics of soldering. But once you get past the very basic kits, you need something more fun and challenging! The Tinycade 8-bit Handheld Arcade is a great way to get some soldering practice in and have a cool toy to play with afterward.

Consisting of entirely through-hole parts, the Tinycade will probably take an hour or more for a newbie solderer; for experienced pros, probably under 20 minutes. The kit is based around the venerable ATtiny85, programmed with one of the games that has been made for this platform. There’s a list of a few more that they’ve compiled, available to download as .hex files for easy flashing with avrdude. Note that you will need an AVRISP or similar programming tool if you want to change the game loaded on the ATtiny85. However, we have a huge selection of those to choose from, if needed!

So if you know anyone getting into electronics and soldering, this would make a great gift that will help them hone their skills. Though this item is marked as a pre-order, we imagine it’s probably ready to ship very soon.

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Being able to measure AC loads is very handy for a whole-house automation system. Measuring draw on the grid can allow you to see where your power is actually going. The PQduino wirelessly measures an AC load up to 5 amps, with a 10 amp peak. Sending the data over the air keeps your system much safer, as there’s no physical connection to low-power devices like a PC, and so the entire system can be fully enclosed to prevent accidental shock.

The UI design looks amazing, and a huge number of important parameters are displayed, including RMS voltage and current, active and reactive power, frequency, THD and much more. The data is presented in a clear, easy to read way, and there’s nothing stopping you from writing your own code to analyze or store the data in any way you please!

It’s even possible to measure a 3-phase system using three PQduinos and integrating the data from all three. With OTA updating, an installed system can be updated and upgraded without having to shut off power or even open the enclosure it’s installed in. Supporting both Wi-Fi with an ESP8266 and Bluetooth with an HC-05, you can do fast data transfers or go to a low-power mode using Bluetooth only.

While the main measurement transformer is only rated for 5A continuous, 10A peak, adding an external current transformer can easily expand the measurement range to whatever is needed. Just keep in mind that working with mains voltage can be dangerous — always remove power from all devices before working on them. Use the proper safety equipment, and if in doubt call a professional electrician to do the installation for you.

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Plastic can be recycled, though often not as well or as cheaply as we’d like to believe. And despite that, huge amounts of plastic end up in landfills and in the world’s oceans. So, instead of recycling, why not upcycle that plastic soda bottle into a glowing Solar Bottle Lamp? Upcycling is the practice of reusing items in ways not originally intended as a way to extend their useful life, and this project is a great way to make some decorative lights out of something that would otherwise be thrown away. This very neat product by Open Green Energy is a creative and Eco-friendly way to divert some plastic from the waste stream and get a very pretty and useful object as the end result!

The kit comes with the PCB & all the components needed to make it. Optionally, they can send you the 3D printed enclosure, solar panel, and battery connector, or you could use your imagination and upcycle something else to work as the case? Or just bust out your 3D printer with recycled plastics, perhaps taking inspiration from this excellent talk by Helen Little from the recent Open Hardware Summit on how to test different recycled plastics for 3D printing.

Open Green Energy also separately sell their high-efficiency solar panels, which are very handy to have for powering outdoor projects, as well as another spin on the Bottle Lamp but instead using mason jars. Another important goal of the project is to help provide reusable, simple, inexpensive lights for people living in rural India who may not have access to reliable electricity. We think that’s a commendable goal!

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When WiFi doesn’t go far enough, and LoRa is going to break the bank, there’s always the wonderful world of ISM band radios! The SympleLink radio system from Raging Bits might just be what you’re looking for. Unlike the super cheap ISM devices that send a single UART stream, the SympleLink has firmware which can handle a UART, an I2C bus, and 4 GPIO! That’s enough to control just about anything on the receiving end.

Each device has a unique address, and will only connect and communicate with its associated central device. The devices are capable of up to a 1/2 mile (800m) transmission distance if line-of-sight is possible. A single Central module can communicate with many Peripheral boards, and the included documentation is quite detailed and will have you up and running in no time.

The SympleLink uses the LPD433 band, which means that it’s only legal to use in Europe and Malaysia as an ISM band device; licensed amateur radio operators may be able to use these devices if they comply with all the important regulations (including transmitting your callsign) but it’s best to check the laws in your country.

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A brand-new addition to our shop is this family of Arduino-compatible boards that are self-soldered and designed for interoperability. The Motherboard is the central unit in the system, containing an ATmega328p programmed with the Arduino bootloader, as well as space for a real-time clock and battery as well as a Bluetooth serial module. The connections are all broken out to a screw-terminal header along the bottom of the board, making it easy to attach wires of almost any size or shape.

The silkscreen is a very nice touch for beginners, helping you to see exactly which pins are connected to what, and labelling all the pins on the header clearly. Power traces are bolded, making them easy to spot. Additionally, every pin on the ATmega as well as the RTC are separately broken out to 0.1″ pads on either side of the chip, making it easy to solder in headers for quick prototyping.

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VGA output is a great way to add some interactivity and colour to your projects, and with the Pico having 2 cores it’s a great candidate for VGA systems. This PicoVGA Card is based on the original PicoVGA project/library by Miroslav Nemecek but adds a bunch of handy connectors including a joystick port, a 3.5mm audio output jack, and a USB-A connector to power the board.

This platform is perfect for developing retro-style video games! The PicoVGA library includes built-in support for sprites, almost 30 different frame buffer formats including 8/4/2/1-bit graphics, text modes, tiles, and more. It does all this while leaving one of the two Pico cores free for the user program, meaning your game can run at full speed on a single core without having to give up any processing time to the VGA library. Simply write to the display buffer and the PicoVGA library takes care of the rest.

With the special text modes, this could also be easily made into a pocket serial terminal, which is something I’m interested in trying. There aren’t many ways to get a portable, easy to use serial terminal for so little investment, and with the number of retro computers and other serial projects surrounding me, having a Pico-based serial terminal would be awesome!

Additionally, designer Land Boards has also broken out all the pins of the Pico, which is a nice touch that I wish every single attachment board would do. This makes it much easier to build into a project without having to solder a bunch of wires directly to the Pico or the underside of the board. It also has 4 mounting holes to make integration into a project box easy. Check it out and bring that 8-bit vibe to your next project!

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