Over the next few days, Tindie Sellers are offering discounts on hundreds of items. It’s the perfect moment to order the parts for your next project and save money at the same time.
Hundreds are Available Now and more will be added over the weekend and on Cyber Monday.
The sale highlights some of the best maker made devices, breakout boards and shields from our community. You will find unique electronics that you’ll not find on any other sites. And, when you buy on Tindie you’re supporting a community of independent inventors and tinkerers.
The title alone may be enough to start you hovering your mouse over the buy button, so let’s take a look at the superb touch screen ESP32 Pacman themed Clock (assembly kit)! This retro inspired timepiece comes in a range of colors, and is wholeheartedly inspired by the iconic dot-munching video game characters: Pacman and Ms Pacman!
The clock was the First prize winner in the 2021 Instructable Sound contest, with WIFI synchronised timing and a choice of audio alarm track to get you started in the morning! It comes as a simple kit to assemble yourself, with three options, depending on what you need, including all the required components plus an enclosure. You’ll not only have an awesome clock on your bedside, but you’ll be able to watch the game unfold in the background – with options for customising the action, including changing Pacman to Ms Pacman!
They have shared their build instructions here on Instructables, so you can see what’s required. This excellent Pacman clock is sold by Tech Kiwi Gadgets who are based in New Zealand and have just started selling on Tindie – what a superb start! See the clock in action in it’s full range of colours below:
If you’d like to learn about the basics of electronics, or teach others how an electrical circuit works, then this solderless “Don’t touch the wire” maze kit looks like a great way to get started. The game involves moving a conductive washer from one end of a curved length of wire to the other without actually touching it. One large diameter washer is included, which looks challenging but doable, along with a smaller diameter washer that would certainly be more frustrating.
When playing the game, each washer is connected to an alligator clip, allowing it to complete a circuit when it touches the wire, then sound an alarm to indicate an error. The kit comes with the needed wires and a 2AA battery holder, along with lever nuts that allow builders to snap everything together securely without the use of a soldering iron.
While one would want to avoid getting snapped by these connectors, not having to deal with a dangerously hot soldering iron would eliminate an important barrier to early electronics experimentation. The kit comes with instructions, and after one builds the kit (and learns about completing a circuit) it can function as a fun toy and conversation piece!
If you like your music glitchy, then this DIY chiptune synth could become vital to your music-making process! Create gritty bass or dial-up-inspired lead synths by controlling the complex mathematical layers of frequencies and soundscapes hiding inside the Glitch Storm MKII.
Based on Spherical Sound Society’s popular Glitch Storm, the new and upgraded Glitch Storm MKII provides a compact and effective sound-shaping solution. The glorious chiptune sounds this thing creates can add a brutally digitized aspect to any track! Listen to some of the unprocessed and mesmerising sounds straight from the synth in the video below this article.
This Arduino-powered synthesiser can be shipped either fully assembled or as a fun DIY kit, ready for you to build and add to your waveform manipulating arsenal. It features a clock out connection, allowing you to hook it up to your other hardware. As the Glitch Storm MKII is fully open source, you can even get into a bit of hacking and edit the Arduino code!
Minitel, as described in this project’s listing, is a French great-uncle of the Internet appearing frequently in retro-computing projects. While generally not used outside of France and a handful of other countries, the system did run on millions of dedicated terminals and wasn’t officially retired until 2012. So if you’re in the right place (i.e. France) you might get lucky and pick up one of these devices for a song.
As shown in the video below, these terminals can actually be quite retro-chic, and with a ‘secret’ peripheral port, it’s possible to get them to do your bidding without actually opening up the housing. That being said, Minitel projects generally require some combination of the appropriate connector, an Arduino/Raspberry Pi/etc, breadboard, connectors ,and other such electronic tidbits.
Such a setup can be difficult to work with and transport, and not nearly as fashionable as the Minitel box itself. To help with this challenge iodeo created the Minitel ESP32 dev board. The device includes everything you need to get your terminal working, and is powered from the Minitel device itself. The ESP32 module allows for wireless network interface and OTA programming. So you can change the terminal’s behavior without actually touching anything, or use it as a terminal to interface with other networked devices like a Raspberry Pi.
While such a setup would be difficult to obtain where I reside in the US, if you’re in more Minitel-abundant regions, you’ll know what to do if you come across one of these boxes!
Electronics certainly aren’t just for adults or older kids, they can be great for little ones too – and this Scribble Bot kit proves it. It’s a fun, frenetic device designed to create wobbly images and shaky sketches, which can be varied by the way it’s put together. Get out the felt tips and paper, and start creating some jiggly wiggly vibrating robot art!
Using only two components and a battery, this incredibly affordable project is suitable for almost any age, when supervised by a parent. With no soldering required and all parts included, you simply have to tape one of the motors onto one of the paper bowls and insert a battery – switch it on and you’ll get some instant amusing artwork!
Once you have a few Scribble Bots assembled, you can watch as each one creates its unique pattern based on the weight distribution of the components. Inspire the kids you know, and create new makers for our world to learn from in the future!
Elkei Education is an independent electronics company selling wonderful educational kits for all ages from their Tindie store based in Toowoomba, Australia. Support their brilliant designs and enhance your automated drawing skills by trying one out yourself!
If you want to test your skills in the biggest (well… smallest) challenge of solder training, then this is the kit for you! Experience the true meaning of ‘no mercy’ with these increasingly minute surface mount SMD Challenge Kits!
With various difficulty levels ranging all the way to the aptly named ‘Misery Edition’, you will definitely come out of this experience having learnt a thing or two about surface mount soldering. These challenge disks feature miniature components such as resistors and LEDs, arranged in a order of soldering points over the PCB. If you manage to complete everything correctly, you win – and the LEDs will all light up!
Designed to be an arduous and difficult task, Makers Box created this kit for the biggest soldering masochists. They have posed a challenge to anybody who wants to face the frustration, awarding certificates to anyone who manages to complete this super tricky kit!
Makers Box is an independent electronics company based in Oregon, USA. Shipping out orders every Saturday, they love supporting electronics workshops and are open to custom or bulk orders. If you want to find out more about their awesome kits, check out their Tindie storefront!
The Roland TR-909 is a classic drum machine which was released in the early 80s, and is still heralded today as one of the cornerstones of electronic music. If you have an MPC 2000XL then you’ll be pleased to find this roland tr 909 floppy for MPC which contains a formatted kit of 909 samples ready to be triggered from the classic music production center!
Buying this floopy disk means you can load up the sounds of the TR-909 on your MPC and immediately start playing – no need to sample anything or set up keygroups; a time-consuming process for anyone who’s done it before! The samples have been optimised at 16-Bit 44kHz and feature the kick, open hi hat, closed hi hat, rimshot, snare, clap, ride, crash, and toms (low mid high) – get ready to make a dance floor smasher! A demo pattern and program are also included on the disk, which can be sent worldwide with a tracking number.
The 909 formatted floppies are sold by VALPower who sell a number of useful devices for music making – this being their first foray into floppies! Perhaps we’ll see some more in the future, surely the 808 is only a matter of time. What would you like to load up in your MPC?
You wait all your life for a Biosonification device and then two come along in one month! As we mentioned a few weeks back, these devices turn the energy from plants and such into musical MIDI data – and this Biodata Sonification (MIDI – Bluetooth – Wifi) comes with the added feature of convenient wireless connectivity!
This updated version for 2021 will connect to plants and send their minute electrical pulses out as musical notes over a choice of wireless technology – either BlueTooth or WiFi. It comes with a neat enclosure, a handy rechargeable battery, and both snap electrodes and sticky electrodes to hook things up. For those more adventurous, this product is sold by the seller in kit form to make your own! The unit can be configured and reprogrammed in your web browser or via Arduino IDE – with the open-source code and more information available on their website. The seller is happy to field any questions you might have about happy plant-based music making!
This Biodata Sonification device is sold by electricityforprogress who are new on the scene with these two simultaneous sound making wonders! You’ll find a full run down and explanation of the device in the youtube video below.
We’ve often written about the fabled sound chips of the past, and none is more heraded than the legendary SID chip which originally came in the Commodore 64! This particular piece is a SID Soundchip Interface, designed for the RC2014 giving rise to big low end basses, gleep-ing arpeggios and rich thick pad sounds.
The interface connects to a standard RC2014 slot and allows the Z80 to write to the registers of the SID chip. There is an interrupt generator added which can be set to generate at roughly 50/60/100Hz, in order to meet the frame rate of the Commodore 64. Send the outputted sound to your headphones or external device using the on-board stereo 3.5mm socket – though the SID outputs mono, it’ll be sent equally to both channels. Be aware that while this will make glorious chip music, there is currently no specific software available for the RC2014 to drive the interface; what better chall;enge to get great things going?!
You’ll find some things to help though, including Z80 code on github (originally for the SAM Coupe) for emulating the C64’s CPU to play .sid song files. This SID Soundchip interface for RC2014 is designed by Quazar who sell all manner of RC2014 and ZX Spectrum Next among many others from their headquarters in Edinburgh.
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