Tindie

The beauty of animation is something which captivates us in childhood and for many, holds that magical air well into adulthood. Seeing animations before your very eyes is particularly mesmerising, and this JF Modern Phenakistoscope DIY Basic Kit is a superb way to experience this wonderful optical illusion of movement!

This incredible device comprises a sleek stand which has a built-in motor and lights to rotate the colourful cards – revealing tiny miniature worlds of motion! The beauty of this design is that it can be viewed with no additional apparatus, so it can be seen and enjoyed by any number of people at the same time. It uses an Arduino Nano, which can be added to the kit as a purchase option – as well as the motor, to give you all you need to complete this device. It’s both a perfect gift and a stunning tabletop device. The still images cannot do this justice, but see the video below of how engrossing the animations are!

This JF Modern Phenakistoscope DIY Basic Kit is sold by jolliFactory who are based in Singapore who sell some really fantastic and innovative tech goodies. Now, time to enjoy the images in motion:

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Whether you’re an artist, a streamer, a gamer, a programmer, or anything computer-based – the Hub20 Programmable Macropad will help you perform at top speed! You can customise its beautiful array of 15 RGB backlit mechanical keys to suit any need, however specific it might be.

The benefit of using a macro pad alongside your standard keyboard is that it can address specific tasks with ease. You can program macros to complete a complex series of actions from a single keypress. Maybe you have to type out the same email address in every form, multiple times a day. Instead of writing it out each time, a macro can assign the entire action to a single key. People have even created macros to complete entire video game levels!

This fantastic piece of hardware will help consolidate and speed up your workflow by automating keyboard and mouse operations, featuring four USB-C connections and two rotary encoders to maximise the control possibilities. For more information on assembling the kit and programming your macros, the maker has provided an excellent getting started guide on their GitHub!

The Hub20 comes in either white, black, or clear acrylic with a high-quality PCB. Immediately after assembly, it already functions as a super valuable number pad – but go ahead and program your own even more functional macros using the detailed instructions in their guide.

So, quick! Snap them up before I do! The maker, Josh Johnson, is based in Geelong, Australia – and has been selling exciting macropad gadgets like this on Tindie since 2020.

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There are many fantastic modules in music making; common ones being filters, oscillators, and envelopes but there are a world of other options. This Voltage Controlled 4046 Wave Shaper is one such example, which takes an input oscillation from an external VCO (Voltage Controlled Oscillator) and allows you to output that one single sound over multiple octaves!

The design is based on the Barton Musical Circuits 4046 Wave Shaper, which uses a uses a CD4046 phase locked loop chip in combination with a binary counter to multiply the frequency of the input signal – allowing for a vast range of output frequencies between -3 Octaves and +3 Octaves. This particular design uses a Voltage Controlled mixer, which enables you to send it CV signals to modulate the played back sounds. It also has a gain control for the output signal, which is a convenient addition for when the signal gets a bit hot.

Note that in order to complete this build you’ll need to source some extras detailed on the product page. The Voltage Controlled 4046 Wave Shaper is sold by Analog Output who are based in Syracuse, NY in the USA – and offer a wealth of modular goodies to check out! See the Wave Shaper in action below:

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For those music makers who like the lo-fi sound, inspired by MPCs and Akai Samplers of the 1990s – bit crushing and, to give it it’s formal name; bit reduction is highly desirable! Well now you can create your very own bit crusher effect, with this Complete DIY Bit Crusher Kit! You’ll find it’s loaded with options, and is simple enough to make given some prior soldering experience.

Bit reduction takes our modern high fidelity audio formats and adds vintage harmonics and audio artifacts which we might recall from the early days of technology – think 8 bit computing and sound synthesis from retro video games. Inside the kit, you’ll find all you need to make a complete bit crusher yourself, with three purchase options depending on what you’d like to source yourself. Choose to buy the PCB and pre-programmed chip alone, buy the kit with all the electronics components included, or get the full kit with sockets, knobs, and colourful arcade button!

This effect makes the sound more crunchy, angular and digital – just what you need to maximise the lof fi flavour of any instrument.

The Complete DIY Bit Crusher Kit is sold by midierror who is based on the Southern shorelines of England. Check out his store for more audio and MIDI goodies! See what youtube music tech aficionado DIVKID had to say about the effect here:

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If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, cooler weather is here. In some locations seeing outdoor flowers is largely something that has left and will return in a few months. Whether you need something to brighten up your day, or if you live in a continuously green and colorful outdoor environment, the Flower everblooming flower from Jiří Praus looks like a wonderful addition to your living space.

The Flower is triggered via a circuit sculpture leaf that acts as a capacitive touch sensor. When brushed, the flower’s six petals open via a stepper motor and linkage system, revealing it’s luminescent inner section, powered by seven individually-addressable LEDs.

The device is handmade in the Czech Republic, and features an app for control and parameter modification, as well as a USB-C interface for programming tasks. Inside, an ESP32 is used to control the leaf’s touch functionality, and provides WiFi and Bluetooth connection options. The Flower is open source, and extendable via I2C sensors, so a wide range of enhancements and modifications should be possible.

If this flower looks familiar, we featured an early version of it in 2019 that used a bent metallic frame for the petals instead of the more diffuse design seen today. As reported there, Praus wasn’t sure if he’d be making these mechanical flowers available for purchase, but you never know how a project will develop!

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Let your musical creativity flow with this genre-defying drum synthesiser! This fantastic device rides the boundaries between a sequencer, a synthesiser, and a drum machine – doing awesome generative stuff for your music! If you need some new and intriguing sound textures, the ARCANE Generative FM Drum Synth is just the instrument for you.

Featuring six potentiometers and three high-quality buttons, ARCANE is controlled by the ever-useful Arduino Nano, and can be delivered either fully assembled or as a fun DIY kit. Find your groove by modulating the sounds using the on-board controls –  flipping through generative sequences and transforming them into something new! The inbuilt glitch musicality knob is essential for choosing the kind of sounds you want this instrument to deliver – is it a drum, or a synth?ARCANE is based on the iconic Yamaha YM2413 FM chip – originally used to create the arcade machine sounds that audiophiles obsess over these days! It even has CV (control voltage) compatible clock in and clock out jacks, meaning you can combine this with any other modular gear! Check out the video below to hear some of the incredible sounds this thing can make.

Spherical Sound Society are an independent electronics company based out of Torrevieja, Spain. A popular store here on Tindie since 2019, they are known for their wide variety of excellent modular synth gear.

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The Commodore 64 holds a special place in many a computer enthusiast’s heart. That being said, the floppy disks used to load programs and files onto this computer can be less-than convenient, not to mention hard to find. If you’d like to step into the 21^st century with your storage, while still using retro C64 hardware, then endresz_eu may have just the solution with the SD2IEC floppy emulator.

The device allows you to store your 1s and 0s on a microSD card, which is plugged into a reader on the device. The SD2IEC then interfaces with the C64’s serial port as a virtual floppy drive, providing a quasi SD-to-floppy bridge. Power can be provided externally via a Micro USB port, or you can simply plug it into the Commodore’s cassette port for juice.

The virtual drive address is set to 8, but you can change it to 9, 10, or 11 via a pair of DIP switches. While an SD card up to 32GB can be used, since C64 programs are so small, a 1 GB disk should give you nearly all the storage you could ever want. Most games will run on this system, but according to its creator no Commodore floppy emulator is 100% perfect, so you might want to keep those floppys around as well!

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It’s December, meaning a variety of decorations can be put up to celebrate the holiday season. Christmas trees are perhaps the most prominent of such decorations, but cutting down a large healthy plant presents some practical obstacles. Some may also see it as wasteful, as they’ll be discarded in a month or so. For a reusable festive light show that won’t break your back (or budget) to set up, and doesn’t require refilling a bowl of water, check out this WiFi-Enabled Addressable LED Christmas Tree Kit from Moritz Wirger.

The tree uses an array of 14 APA106-F5 addressable LEDs for lighting, along with a Wemos D1 mini WiFi module for control. This setup makes it WiFi capable from the get-go, presenting a wide range of coordinated lighting possibilities. Another excellent feature of this lighting kit is it’s 3D design, featuring two concentric PCB lighting support circles, along with a third level of one LED on the top.

Of course, this isn’t the only Christmas tree on Tindie. In 2017 we examined another 3D kit that uses discreet components to flash at a set rate. Either option looks like a lot of educational fun, though the device here will give you a lot more control if needed!

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The Kenbak-1 was the first ever personal computer, released in 1971 and able to complete a variety of complex mathematical equations using binary input. This stunning full-size recreation by Adwater & Stir pays homage to the incredibly rare collectable original with this 50 piece limited run of their Kenbak-1 Replica.

Adwater & Stir have gone above and beyond to ensure this replica is as accurate as possible. In striving to create this precise remake they contacted the manufacturers of the originals outer shell, and were told that the case had been discontinued in the early 80s! The maker was ever hopeful, and asked for a limited run of the cases to be created – but was sadly denied. Thankfully, the manufacturers were more than happy to share the original engineering drawings – which Adwater & Stir took to a local metal shop to have recreated. This hard work and dedication shine through in the final product, a thoughtful recreation of an essential aspect of computing history.Having sold a micro and a nano version of this on Tindie in the past, it’s clear that Adwater & Stir know their stuff. Operated by an ATMEL processor, this more straightforward and modernised circuit runs the same way as the original Kenbak-1. It even has enhancements ranging from a real-time clock to a USB connection, which allows for uploading or downloading code.

Adwater & Stir is an independent electronics company based in Minnesota, USA, and has been selling their recreations on Tindie since 2018.

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The N-Synth Super was unveiled by Google Magenta labs in 2018 – an incredible open source sample playback machine which uses machine learning to crossfade accurately between any four sound sources! While all the schematics and PCB designs are available to make your own, it’s sometimes more appealing to buy a finished unit and that’s what the NSynth Super – Fully assembled is all about!

It comes as a sleek completed unit, with numerous controls to make and create sounds: the four outer knobs select the sound on each corner of the unit with the touch screen X-Y controller being used to sweep between them. It can be played via MIDI – meaning it can be sequenced, automated and controlled using any DAW or external sequencer. This model comes with a Raspberry Pi 3B and a 64GB Memory card inside to store your sounds on. It has USB connectivity too, and features a 3.5mm output socket to send the sounds to headphones, amplifiers and mixers.

This is the first product to be sold by lko who are based in Mosty, Poland. It’s a phenomenal synth which really encapsulates modern technology in one music making device. To have one fully made for you without sourcing parts is very convenient for those who want more time to rock out!

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