Tindie

The moment I see any project involving a robot with personality, I’m sold. In hindsight, that love probably stems from having a Tiger Poo-Chi as a kid. The MiniPupper Robot Dog Kit is the Poo-Chi of 2022 and is ready for adoption! It’s a simplified version of the Boston Dynamics Spot – a quadrupedal robot with a distrust of banana peels. Unfortunately, Spot comes with a hefty $75,000 price tag but you can now get your own lovable robot dog for a fraction of that cost from Tindie seller MangDang.

There are four different kits available, with two options including differing levels of assembly completed ahead of time depending on the users’ interest. The system uses a Raspberry Pi 4B (2G) as the brains, and includes a single-lens camera for image processing and a mini LCD on the front for customization and endless interactivity possibilities! The creators have even built their own custom high-torque 9g servos for the project, giving the MiniPupper an impressive 12 degrees of freedom.

MangDang has also made the project completely open-source and has received recognition for their very good boy from Hackaday, Raspberry Pi, and other publications. Just take a look at all the documentation they have and bring home your new robotic best friend!

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There are many LED displays out there for the average hacker to use. They are all roughly similar in hardware, so often the differentiating features are in the software that backs them up. The newest revision of the Pixie Chroma is a smart, 2-digit, 5×7 display module that is easy to use but has extremely good software, making your projects easier to bring to life!

Lixie Labs have clearly put in a huge amount of work for this iteration. The two new headline features are Quad Mode (a way to drive batches of the displays in parallel for faster refresh) and Shortcodes (making displaying symbols or any character much simpler). I’m particularly interested in the Shortcodes; these function much like emojis do on chat platforms like Discord: you enter the name of a symbol surrounded by delimiters, and the software interprets it as a particular image. While the software has 240 Shortcodes built-in, they offer an awesome web-based editor for creating more.

Simply click the pixels to set the display you want, and then copy and paste the generated code into your project. No more graph paper and binary arithmetic! This allows the displays to be used for just about any application you can imagine.

Their documentation is excellent, and they currently support the ESP8266, ESP32, and Teensy 3.x. Support for the RP2040 and SAMD21 are planned. And the best part of all is this project is OSHWA-certified Open Hardware!

Check out their YouTube video to see just how smooth and gorgeous these displays are:

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A water softener is a fairly common piece of equipment found in many homes. Fill it with a bunch of salt, and all those calcium ions will be replaced with sodium ions. Your soap lathers now, and you might just get rid of those deposits on your coffee pot.

While a bag of salt may last a month or so in a water softener, you can’t know what you don’t measure. That’s what led Erik Lemcke to create the Salt Sentry, an IoT gizmo to monitor the level of salt in a water softener.

For measurement, the Salt Sentry uses a Time-of-Flight laser-ranging sensor to measure the distance from the water softener to the salt block. It’s a simple solution, and more than accurate to tell you if you’ll need to fill up the water softener in the next week or so.

The brain of the Salt Sentry is an Espressif ESP-WROOM-02, incorporating an ESP8266 microprocessor in a small package. This module sets up a web server that’s accessible over WiFi, and has support for MQTT, so your home assistant of choice will tell you when to buy more salt. You can check out an example of what the web interface looks like in the panel to the left.

Because the ESP8266 is well-supported by the Arduino IDE, the Salt Sentry is also fully hackable, with six GPIO pins broken out onto an internal header. If you want to expand the Salt Sentry to provide more measurement, go for it. Add a light sensor, so you know when the basement light is on. There’s already a really, really awesome manual for the Salt Sentry available and a bit more information available on how to connect it to your network.

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Wireless connectivity is almost a given in 2022, with most devices disposing of the ports and sockets we all love, for futuristic, cable free connections! But if you ever wanted to connect your C64 using wireless technology, then the WME64 Wifi Modem is just what you need!

This budget friendly way of connecting your beloved Commodore 64, 128, or VIC-20 to the net is the ideal way to get back on the old BBS services without mountains of cables and adapters – connecting to a modern Wifi router as you would with a laptop, desktop or mobile device. It connects to the user port, emulating a 2400 baud (or faster) modem – and is, incredibly, compatible with every program that uses a modem!

The brains behind the operation is the ESP8266 microcontroller and its case is designed and 3D printed by the seller complete with a snazzy color label. The WME64 Wifi Modem is ready to go form the moment it arrives – conveniently pre-configured at your choice of speed. Time to get on the information superhighway!

If you’re into ancient devices going online, I highly recommend Dan Wood’s excellent youtube channel where he explores that exact topic – amongst other fantastic things! This is the first product from Studio 8502 who are based in Ontario, Canada. We can’t wait to see what they have in store next!

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USB-C has become a highly popular connection standard – with Micro-USB being a bit too brittle and fiddly to stand the test of time – and people looking for something more compact than the ageing USB-B and Mini standards. Those who own a Sony PS4 happened to miss out on this solid connection style, but fortunately a Tindie seller is here to save the day with the PS4 Controller USB-C Circuit Board.

Given the popularity of the console, PS4 controllers will, at some point, need to be charged and the game put on hold (sorry, speedrun over) – utilizing the Micro USB charging port the pad originally came with. This open-source design seeks to replace that port and give you a much more solid and long-lasting design for many a gaming night into the future! The only caveat for this excellent little problem solver, is that you need to buy 5 boards from the seller – which is no bother if you have a few controllers waiting to be converted. It seems a fairly simple process to replace and will be worth the time investment and the tinkering to do so!

The PS4 Controller USB-C Circuit Board is the first product to be sold by Marcus Heier, who’s based in Viken, Norway.Here he is explaining the process of production, with more videos related to the product on his youtube page.

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Drones as a platform have seen awesome growth in accessibility and versatility recently, going down a path similar to 3D printing over the last couple of years. With prices dropping and a healthy mix of options between DIY and off-the-shelf, the potential use cases are as exciting as they are many. The ability to customize your own flying platform can be a game-changer, and if you’re looking for the first place to start in adding some extra sensorization to your DIY drone, this awesome hydrometer and temperature sensor is the way to go!

This weather sensor was designed for integration with a PixHawk system running the PX4 firmware, a wildly popular flight controller amongst enthusiasts and professionals alike – and a personal favorite of mine! If you’re looking to collect data during a flight, inform your autopilot, or have a livestream of data from the sensor, this tiny peripheral can help you with it all. The sensor is not just restricted to being on a drone either – the built-in I2C lets you hook it up to your favorite microcontroller and use it in your outdoor projects as well! The creator recommends between 3.6V to 5.4V for a supply voltage, and many more details can be found on the sensor’s documentation page.

Thunderfly has some other excellent drone accessories to get you up and hovering. Whether you’re a drone videographer, a citizen scientist, and a farmer keeping tabs on their crops, there are a plethora of options for you on their store page.

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Love it or hate it, or somewhere in between, attaching parts to one another via molten solder is an essential skill for electronics assembly. Applying surface mount parts generally involves solder paste, and if you don’t have a stencil, this means squirting small dabs of the stuff over and over on your designated connection points. In order to dispense the appropriate (tiny) amount of solder onto your board, without the fuss of electronic manipulators, Albert van Dalen is offering the Spoty micro-dot solder paste dispenser.

The video below shows a demo of the device in action, dispensing paste for 0603, and even 0201 components, along with a clip of how the device itself is assembled. Use wise, you position the dispensing head over the solder pad, then push paste out mechanically via the trigger lever, similar to how a caulk gun works. It’s a beautiful in its simplicity, and something that should make things much easier than trying to squeeze out just the right amount of solder paste from a syringe unassisted.

For another solder dispensing option, I reviewed the e.Dispenser system here. It’s much more versatile, and even offers vacuum pickup capabilities. At the same time, it’s more expensive and complicated than the Spoty device, so you’ll want to consider which of one best suits your needs.

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There’s no shortage of retro-computing fans and projects on Tindie. While you can use a C64, BBC Micro, or any number of other systems for a fun trip down memory lane, at the end of the day, you’re likely most productive on a Windows, Mac, or Linux computer for your daily needs. If, however, you’d like to combine the old-school aesthetic of a 1980s-era pointing device with modern computing hardware, tinkerBOY has a neat solution in the form of the AMX Mouse To USB Converter.

This device is an adapter that attaches to your AMX mouse via a 20-pin female adapter, and interfaces with your computer using a USB-A plug. Onboard hardware takes care of translating mouse inputs to USB, letting you plug(and plug)-and-play your old-school mouse into your newer computing system with ease. This adapter is compatible with AMX, Quest, Wigmore, and Nidd Valley interface devices.

Whether or not you’d like to use one of these very old pointing devices, the listing’s pictures are quite an interesting look at some neat retro-hardware. For another computer interface option, be sure to check out the Wii-Nunchuck-to-Mouse adapter featured here.

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Floppy disks were once the data storage medium of choice. All software came on floppies, as CD-ROM drives cost as much as a car, and you weren’t cool unless you had at least two floppy drives in your computer. Those days are long gone, but there’s now a way to connect any floppy drive to a modern PC. It’s the Greaseweazle, a USB to floppy adapter distributed by Tindie Seller Emmy Bear Holdings.

The Greaseweazle is an interface board that treats an old floppy drive as a USB drive – genius! This includes PC and Mac disks (including 400k and 800k disks), Apple II, Amiga, weird CP/M disks, and even old PDP-11 disks in an 8″ drive. It does this by reading the magnetic flux on the disk, then that data is converted and read by a number of programs.

While the Greaseweazle is just hardware, there are a few software tools to read disks. The official Greaseweazle Host Tools will get you started, and FluxEngine is also supported by the Greaseweazle hardware.

If you’ve got a pile of floppies sitting around in storage and are looking for a way to bring that data to new hardware, it’s hard to go wrong with a Greaseweazle. Just add a floppy drive, a floppy drive ribbon cable, and you’re on your way to reading all those old floppies.

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If you were a PC gamer in the 1990s, you probably remember the bleeps and bloops of the built-in PC speaker. If, however, you were willing to spend the money for an audio upgrade, the most prominent sound card – the aptly-named Sound Blaster by Creative Labs, could upgrade your experience immensely. It’s a difference that’s perhaps hard to appreciate today, but it took audio from an afterthought to something that could be truly appreciated as a part of the gaming experience. For a retro-modern take on this device, LABS is offering the Blasterboard Sound Blaster compatible as a kit or fully assembled.

The Blasterboard is software compatible with Sound Blaster 2.0, and features a number of upgrades on the original. It works with 8-bit PCB and ADPCM samples via an Atmel MCU, and performs FM music playback using a genuine Yamaha OPL2 chip. It can play sounds when routed to the PC speaker, as well as handling line-level inputs from a CD or other source. Onboard mixers are also available to keep the different sound sources in check.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of this board is that the audio output has a -94dB RMS signal-to-noise ratio. The original Sound Blaster measures in at -46dB, while even the high-end AWE64 Gold had only a -80dB rating. The Blasterboard sounds like a great upgrade for your retro-gaming setup, and something that could be an excellent learning experience in kit form.

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