Tindie

The pyramids of Egypt, along with the Spinx and other wonders, have fascinated onlookers for millennia. While we may never quite understand how they were constructed, if you’ve ever wanted to build your own miniature version, you might like to check out the REX Woody Series DIY Egyptian Pyramids by Robotistan.

Unlike the original stone pyramids, this mini-monument is made out of wood, and can be assembled by kids and adults alike. The set comes with a model of the Keops structure, plus the Spinx next to it. The pyramid features an arrangement of LEDs around its perimeter, and it comes with the wiring, batteries, and switch needed to make it shine. While not included, one could see this setup enhanced with a microcontroller board to flash away at random, or even as a reaction to stimulus!

The product page notes that this can be a great learning tool for kids, allowing them to practice their fine motor skills while putting it together, and to compare larger and smaller squares that stack up to the “sky.” The parallel LED circuit that lights up the base can also be a great first step into the world of electronics, perhaps inspiring architecture endeavors in the future!

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The 2022 OHS was on April 22, 2022. It was held online this year — though hopefully next year will be in person! The summit was a great success, and it was hugely informative and entertaining. The opening keynote by Ashley Jane Lewis was simply amazing. As a white man, I don’t feel it’s my place to try and summarize or repeat her message — I simply would like you to go see it and hear it for yourself. You can watch the keynote here:

The summit celebrated all the amazing contributions to Open Hardware over the last year, and as I mentioned in my previous post I was really looking forward to the Open Source Toys for Endangered Animals talk. And they didn’t disappoint! Not only did we get to see some adorable animals (including tapirs and ocelots and sun bears) but we also got to see how Open Hardware was helping to make a real impact on the quality of life of these endangered species. Valencia the tapir showed us that interesting open source hardware doesn’t have to be high-tech! Often low-tech solutions (like a pineapple on a string) can solve the problem (tapir needing stimulation). Not coincidentally, I now really want to visit their lab (Dinalab) in Panama! You can see their entire talk here. Check out some of their clientele in the image below.

As sponsors of the 2022 Summit, we at Tindie got to chat with a bunch of attendees at our virtual “table”. We talked about neat products that are Open Hardware Certified, such as the Mooltipass and the Vinduino (a past Hackaday Prize winner!) that are listed on Tindie. Our sister website Hackaday was there also, revealing info about this year’s upcoming Hackaday Prize. The first challenge Planet-Friendly Power is almost over, and on May 1st the second challenge Reuse, Recycle, Revamp starts. So get your sustainable ideas flowing, and create a project on Hackaday.io to enter the contest!

Sustainability was another key topic at the summit. One of the talks that I really enjoyed was Helen Little’s talk about recycling plastics into 3D printable pellets. She works for a company called re:3D making large-scale 3D printers. They are very interested in creating a sustainable process for reusable, 3D printable plastics. While there are already some filaments available made with recycled plastics, they want to be able to feed ground up plastic directly into a printer.

In order for this process to be practical and sustainable, the resulting plastic pellets have to have material properties that are consistent and strong enough to displace some of the brand-new materials from the market. In order to test the materials, they first dehydrate the recycled plastic, as most plastics are hydrophilic and will pull water from the air. Then using an open-source tool called ImageJ, the particles of the plastic are analyzed to check for grain size differences between different recycling processes. Then they create many prints, including standard additive test pieces like NIST’s Standard Test Artifact (public domain!) and a few other prints for testing various parameters like bed adhesion and extrusion rate (like the Moai above!). There is just so much detail to go into that I strongly recommend you just go watch her talk if you are interested!

The entire summit was a lot of fun. It was great to connect with a bunch of other hackers interested in all sorts of things! If you’re working on something and want to get it certified as Open Hardware, check out their website at https://www.oshwa.org/ and click on the Certification page. If you want to watch the entire summit or just certain talks, check out their YouTube channel where the individual talks have now been uploaded. You can also see the archive of the whole stream.

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This Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) is just about the smallest one we’ve ever seen. With an accelerometer and gyroscope operating at up to 6.7 kHz and a Time-of-Flight sensor, the Tracer from elektroThing will give you the orientation of anything you strap it to, streaming signals back to your phone.

The idea behind the Tracer is to stick an IMU on any object to trace its pose and motion. This can mean anything from taking a mountain bike off a sweet jump, the motion of a tennis racket or golf club when taking a swing, or simply just strapping it to a glove for a new-Power Glove for the metaversal revolution.

To do accomplish all of this, the Tracer uses an IMU capable of measuring acceleration at ±4/4/6/16 g at 1.6 Hz to 6.7 kHz, and measuring position with a gyroscope at ±125/250/500/1000/2000 DPS at 12.5 Hz to 6.7 kHz. Also on board is a Time-of-Flight sensor that is able to measure absolute distances up to 2m.

But sensors alone do not a tracker make, and for talking to the outside world the Tracer uses an ESP32-PICO-D4 to provide WiFi and Bluetooth. All of this is powered by a coin cell battery and should be good for a few hours of runtime. More than enough to get the readings you need, at least.

Of course, the Tracer is programmable with Micropython and Arduino, and fully supports Phyphox to stream IMU readings directly to your phone.

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The original Nintendo Gameboy was the first time we had an 8-Bit console of pocket processing power at our fingertips, paving the way fot the likes of the Game Gear, Virtual Boy, PSP, Vita, and even the Switch! With new games being (obviously) few and far between for this late 80s system, it’s amazing to know that homebrew games like The Mist are still being released!

The Mist is an 8-Bit horror game about a haunted lighthouse, in which you have to investigate the disappearence of your predessesor by solving puzzles and jumping platforms. While it is possible to play the game using an emulator, we all know the only way to experience the real thing is in a den you’ve put together under your bed or in a nearby tree-house! Joking aside, this is a tremendous achievement from the seller to create a game from scratch – with his own design, story, scripting and coding! If you do decide to buy the real thing, this snazzy blue cartridge will fit into the original DMG Gameboy, the Gameboy Pocket and the Gameboy Color.

The Mist is made by Yliader who is based in France – selling eurorack modules and homebrew GB games with accompanying shells from the coast of Brittany. Here’s a run through of the game in action:

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Circuitmess are a relatively new seller on Tindie, that make amazing STEM kits for young people and adults to learn about a wide range of electronics – from DJ mixers, to video game consoles, WIFI walkie talkies and remote control cars. Based in Croatia, they have gone from strength to strength and were recently visited by the country’s president Zoran Milanović – here he is pictured with Albert Gajšak, CircuitMess’s CEO and Co-founder:

Their products are wonderfully presented with everything you need to get started and inspired by electronics included – we’ll be giving away two of them to lucky readers – details on how to enter are below the interview. We spoke to Albert to find out more… let’s get started!

Where did your fascination with electronics start?

My father is a mechanical engineer and he was always motivating me to build and take apart electronic devices when I was a kid. The first electronic device I made was a small car with an electromotor and a switch made from Meccano blocks. I’ve got no idea where it is now!

Your products have a huge educational element, as well as being great fun in themselves. Where did the desire for this come from?

I was super bored at school. Every single day, I would go to this community hardware club after school and build stuff with other kids there. I wanted to share this love and passion for building electronics that I felt and that’s why I started CircuitMess.

We love the Jay-D portable DJ device – what made you decide to make a musical device?

We came up with a STEM-learning subscription called STEM Box in 2020. We wanted to cover different STEM topics with our products. One of those topics was music and sound synthesis.

One day, I asked a bunch of kids from a friend of mine what is it that’s related to music that excites them. Everyone said – DJ! I want to become a DJ! That’s how we came up with a DJ mixtable kit. The Jay-D has been the most satisfying product we’ve released so far!

You’ve been a Tindie seller since 2018, how has CircuitMess changed in this time?

We’ve scaled our yearly revenue from $0 to $1.3M, sold 55k devices, moved from a small city in Croatia to the capital, employed 23 people, rented a 300m2 office space, bought a pick and place line, bought a laser cutter, and three 3d printers. We take great care to design something which looks unique – I hate Green PCBs because they’re so plain and boring! We also have a designer hired that’s helping us make everything look super pretty.

Tell us how the Nibble Game Console came about – did you play video games as a kid?

Yes, I was a huge video games fan. I was actually inspired by open-source gaming projects such as Arduboy and Gamebuino and that’s how nibble came to be. Apparently, everyone loves video games and Nibble has been our best-selling product up to this day.

Did you encounter any pitfalls on the journey to where you are today? (perhaps things that ended up being good learning experiences).

I employed 13 friends when I started the business, it all crashed and burned and I had to slowly build a team of people that are fit for the job. The team I have now is amazing and I’m proud of every single one of them!

You’re able to entice both kids and big-kids to your kits – how do you ensure your products have a wide appeal?

We usually make the basic kit as simple to assemble as possible and then throw in additional functionalities and upgrade options on top of that to satisfy the hardcore fans. When we test and prototype our products we let our end-users (children) test them. We have also designed a series of test jigs for every PCB we produce which are based on Raspberry pi and have pogo pins:

What inspires you to create new things?

Constant positive feedback from kids and adults from all around the world that tell us how we made their lives better and more enjoyable with our products. My mentor and co-founder Tomislav Car was a big inspiration for me too. He founded his own company when he was 19 and grew it from 0 to 500 employees without any external capital and all by working hard and working smart for 18 years.

What’s on the horizon for CircuitMess?

We want to build more products that will appeal to an even wider audience, especially younger children and people that are afraid of a soldering iron. We now offer a subscription service where you get a new product every three months. We’re going to become the LEGO of STEM education in a few years!

Thanks to Albert and the team for speaking to us! What a great company they are!

CircuitMess x Tindie Giveaway

If you’d like to be in with a chance to win one of the two prizes, a Jay-D DJ Mixer or Nibble Game Console, do one (or all) of the following:

Facebook

1. Like the CircuitMess Facebook Page and Tindie Facebook Page.
2. Comment on the CircuitMess x Tindie Giveaway post on the Tindie Facebook page and tell us which prize you’d like and why. Tag @theCircuitMess and use the hashtag #CircuitMessTindie in your comment.

Instagram

1. Follow @thecircuitmess and @tindie on Instagram.
2. Comment on the CircuitMess x Tindie Giveaway post on the @tindie profile and tell us which prize you’d like and why. Include the hashtag #CircuitMessTindie and tag @thecircuitmess in your comment.

Twitter

1. Follow @circuitmess and @tindie on Twitter.
2. Reply to the CircuitMess x Tindie Giveaway post on the @tindie profile and tell us which prize you’d like and why. Include the hashtag #CircuitMessTindie and tag @circuitmess.

The closing date for entries until 11:59 p.m. PT on Wednesday, May 11, 2022, giving you just under one week to enter!

This Giveaway is open to anyone over 18, or over 13 with parental consent. The Giveaway is open to residents of the US, Canada (excluding Quebec), the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Japan, India, South Africa, and most other countries where the Giveaway is not prohibited or restricted by law.

Two winners will be selected at random from all the valid entries on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The winners will be announced on Monday, 16 May 2022 and contacted via DM by the official Tindie account.

Read the Full CircuitMess x Tindie Giveaway Official Rules to check your eligibility before entering.

– Good luck!

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The Roland TR-808 is one of the most, if not THE most coveted and heralded drum machines of all time. Here’s a great opportunity to build your very own authentic 808 in Eurorack form with the ER-808 Drum Machine PCB and Panel. The kit contains a front panel and set of PCBs to get you off the mark, putting you on an epic path to a soldering and sound adventure!

The entire unit is composed of 14 individual modules which plug into a common bus PCB. The drum machine has a built in sequencer and is driven by a PIC Microcontroller – with two button variations; one with capacitive touch panels and another with push buttons to program the beat! This advanced build comes with 15 high-quality PCBs, a programmed PIC microcontroller and 1 front panel only – requiring you to source the components in order to build the modules. Here’s what a finished build looks like in profile:

The seller has provided build instructions and BOMs to make sure you are supported along the way. The ER-808 is sold by PM Foundations who are based in Lakeland Florida, offering a small selection of modualr kits and eurorack builds for your setup.

See the unit in action here, with more videos on the seller’s youtube channel:

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Perhaps, like me, your first experience of DSP was recording your voice into an Apple Mac Performa 400 (or similar) about 30 years ago (or less), listening back in hysterical tears at the pitched up or slowed down versions of your own voice! Today, the same effect can be achieved on a device like the Voice Changer, turning your voice into a squeaky high pitched squirrel or the low tones of a Darth-Vader impersonator at the touch of a button!

The device has an on-board microphone to take the input signal and switch between three pitch modes: Kylo, Alvin, and Cthulu – it also has a bypass mode for a normal voice. Who do you want to be today? It’s powered by USB or 2x AA batteries, so it’s great for taking around with you, It uses an ESP32 μcontroller to do a Fourier transform to convert the incoming frequencies into something entirely new – there’s also a sound level indicator to display where the volume levels are coming in at.

The voice changer is sold by TurboLEDz who are based in Vancouver, Canada – offering a nice range of meters displays, and processors for various tech projects. Here’s a video of the unit in action:

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In most robotics projects, there’s an age-old conundrum. Do you pick the motors or the motor controller first? Sometimes the project requirements make the decision for you, but in lieu of that, you’re left with a “chicken or the egg first” type of problem.

That is, unless, you’ve found the perfect DC motor controller with a huge range of motors that will work with it with no problem! Enter, the Dual motor controller from Island Robotics. At a price point that would make any robotics enthusiast drool, and flexibility in spades, it is perfect for your next project or just to keep on hand for any spur-of-the-moment build.

This dual motor controller gives you flexibility in input power between screw terminals or XT30 connectors, and a buffet of motor connector options like JST, screw terminals, or even 6 pin motor connections to allow for encoder feedback. The board is able to handle 5-18V and up to 4.5A for each motor, and with a built-in closed loop speed control feature, it’s the perfect companion for just about any brushed DC motors out there. And as the cherry on top, the board is controlled over I2C, and already has a microPython library written by the creators themselves, so integrating it with your favorite microcontroller or microprocessor is a breeze!

If you’re looking for more lovingly crafted robotics components, be sure to keep an eye on the Island Robotics storefront. They’ve already got other wonderful add-ons like these ultrasonic sensor PCB mounts which would make object avoidance in your next robot build that much easier.

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Making visuals from music is very much en vogue at the moment, and what could be better than an 8-Bit Atari-inspired visual style?! Now you can achieve your lofi aesthetic dreams with the VID PIX – 8bit Animation Video Console Kit – generating pixel perfect interpretations of any sound you play into it!

Buy the relevant module for your region (PAL and NTSC available) and plug into the RCA out from a TV or monitor to see your gloriously generated glitches! Control the units sensitivity, auto/manual modes, color/patterns, gate/trigger input voltage and more to customize the audio-reactive-ultra-pixellated visual feedback! Choose from 2 menu modes – by selecting the Digital Diamond or PixelMusic3000 inspired visuals (the latter features classic game characters) and the glitch mode, which alters the amount of pixels and visual fragments on screen.

This is the console kit version which is fully programmable to code your own visual display unit – visit their Github page for more details on this! In case you want to see what the kit comprises of, you’ll find all the components on the available BOM.

The VID PIX is sold by Synthrotek who are based in Troy, in the United States of America. Check out their store for more incredible electronics! Here is the unit in action:

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The BBC Micro:Bit is a highly programmable device which is the perfect introduction to programming software and hardware. For those that want to use theirs for making music the Micro:bit Piano Mini Piano Module is an ideal accessory, coming with a capacitive touch sensor to trigger 13 musical notes!

In addition tothe buttons, LED light display, sensors, and I/O features, this keyboard allows you to play notes and hear them emitted from the on-board buzzer. It also has 4 RGB LEDs (WS2812B) which, presumably, can be programmed to represent any parameters you choose – for example indicating notes being on/off, showing how many notes are currently held, and possibly a little step sequencer?! There’s more info on the sellers GitHub page as well as json files to download and get playing.

You’ll find more information in the product Documentation page, with details on setting up and programming the device for playing music! Connect the musical keyboard using its edge connector and link multiple devices for polyphonic playback or jams with friends. The best place to start your programming journey is on the Micro:Bit makecode page!

It’s sold by SB Components a prolific seller from Halesowen in England, offering a vast selection of electronic accessories and glorious gadgets.

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