Tindie

Soft cards are becoming increasingly popular for vintage computers. Because the cards have modern processors or FPGAs on them, they can easily emulate just about any peripheral ever made for vintage systems, as well as expanding the limits of what can be done on these machines! This ESP32 SoftCard Expansion for the Apple ][ features the ESP32-WROVER-E, a powerful dual-core processor with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built-in. Data is loaded from an SD card, and the list of features is absolutely jaw-dropping.

Like the original Z80 SoftCard, it enables 80-column video output, but this card additionally features audio generation and output. It firmly answers “Yes!” to the age-old question – can it play DOOM? Not only can it play DOOM, but it even supports custom WADs. It can also play Wolfenstein 3D, emulate a Mac Classic, emulate an IBM PC/XT running DOS and Windows 3, emulate Sega Genesis, NES, and TurboGrafx-16, connect to the internet via Wi-Fi, playback videos stored on the SD card… the feature list goes on and on.

The board comes with a 32GB SD card pre-loaded with many of the above features. Additionally, it can work in an Apple IIgs, Laser 128, and many of the Pravetz clone machines. So if you’ve got an Apple II or clone and want to breathe some new life into it, definitely check out the product page, and be sure to read the full list of capabilities in the documentation!

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Although I never actually owned one I do remember playing with an iPod touch wheel when they first came out. Such a lovely way to interact with lists, but a touch wheel can be used for so much more. If you want to experiment with capacitive touch in a circular form then the Touchwheel0 from Todbot Synth Toys is definitely worth a look.

It’s a 30mm diameter wheel on a neat rectangular PCB with mount holes. Sold as a bare board it is supplied with three 0805 surface mount resistors that need soldering to the board. 0805 packages are pretty chunky and are straightforward to solder even for relative beginners. There are 4 pin pads on the PCB, these are -, A, B, and C. The three pins need to be connected to 3 digital GPIO pins on your microcontroller of choice and there are included examples for CircuitPython and Arduino giving you a good start in connecting this to a wide range of systems.

The examples show you how to convert the raw output from the pins into 0-360 degree angle measurements and you can see in the video below an example of two Touchwheel0 controlling two NeoPixel rings. With a hole through the centre of the touch wheel, Tod mentions you could potentially add a button which instantly makes me think of lots of controller ideas! We look forward to seeing what people come up with with these.

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Getting started with FPGAs and hardware description languages can be tough. There’s quite a steep initial learning curve; not only do you have to learn how HDLs work, you also need to learn a whole new toolchain and build process, and possibly an entire new IDE. So it’s good to make things simpler for yourself by picking up a development board that’s known to work and has a good community around it, and the IcyBlue FPGA Feather v2 is exactly that.

The new version uses the same chip as the original, a Lattice ICE5LP4K with 3520 LUTs and lots of I/O, including hardware I2C and SPI blocks. The additional benefit of having on-board programming facilities which work both with open-source toolchains like icestorm and the Lattice tools like Diamond.

The Feather form factor (designed by Adafruit) is a really nice size for smaller development boards. Like almost all Feathers, a Li-Ion battery connector and charge circuitry are included onboard, making it extremely easy to take your project out for test runs on battery power! There are tons of add-on boards compatible with the Feather form factor, so you can quickly add sensors, motor drivers, ADCs/DACs, and just about anything else you need. And a USB-C connector tops it off — we’re glad to see more and more projects switching to USB-C.

If you’ve been wanting to get started in the world of programmable hardware, check out the product page and be sure to check out the other products made by Oak Development Technologies!

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As a rocketeer, I’m always interested to see rocketry-related projects hitting Tindie stores. One of the many interesting and complex challenges with model, mid-power or high-power rocketry is how to capture flight data and how to deploy one or more parachutes or other recovery systems at specific points in the flight.

The new Starlight Mini Flight Computer has an RP2040 on board which certainly gives more than enough processing power for a flight computer. It also features a BMP388 pressure and temperature sensor, which are the two main bits of data you need to calculate altitude. Also on board is a LIS3DHTR accelerometer rated at +- 16g which should cover most rocket flights apart from the most hooligan of minimum diameter builds! Having an accelerometer on board means that this device is capable of launch detection so your rocket isn’t logging lots of extraneous data while sitting on the launch pad. Rounding out the hardware there is 16MB of flash storage on board and a single pyro channel output.

For those unfamiliar, pyro channels are programmable outputs designed to fire an e-match to light small charges held inside the rocket airframe. You can program the flight computer to fire this channel to hopefully split a section of the rocket and push out a recovery system at a specific altitude.

For those with some rocketry experience, it’s worth noting that the small size of the Starlight Mini Flight Computer means it may fit inside a 24mm diameter airframe. This makes us think that it could be interesting for high altitude minimum diameter attempts, possibly using plugged motors, using the pyro channel for apogee deployment. Of course, it could also be used in larger dual deploy rockets in combination with the motor delay ejection method. Finally, it could simply be used for simple logging of flight data.

The device is supplied assembled and requires a single LiPo cell for power. There are flight and programming modes and there is a mission control Java application which you can interact with and change settings on the device.

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The Commodore 64 is still just as popular as ever with retro computer enthusiasts. What’s not to like? Awesome SID music, incredible demo graphics, a huge number of games (with many more being released all the time) and lots of cool peripherals to play with. One of the only areas the C64 missed out on was having a real-time clock. With the awesome Clockwork64 you can not only add an external, very accurate time display to your C64, but you can also use it in software to keep track of time.

Commodore BASIC does have a way to keep time. One of the chips has a timer in it, and increments a clock variable every 1/60th of a second. These 60ths of a second are called “jiffies” and can be accessed in a variable called TI. There’s also a formatted version of TI, simply called TI$ (TI string) which displays the jiffy count in hours, minutes and seconds. But unless TI$ is set to the current time when the machine is powered on, the user has to manually set the time, and this is lost whenever the machine is turned off. But with an external real-time clock like the Clockwork64, you can read from it using either assembly languages or PEEKs and POKEs, and set the clock accurately!

This is a really nice feature if you are using a graphical environment like GEOS, or if you’re using a terminal program that displays the current time — it’s a good way to keep track of how long you’ve been connected to your favourite BBS! Inside the Clockwork64 is the venerable DS3231 real-time clock chip from Maxim, originally made by Dallas (hence the DS prefix). These RTCs are accurate to 1 second per year, and can be calibrated if more accuracy is needed. The external 7-segment displays can show the time in different ways, from the simple HH:MM:SS to a 99-hour timer and more besides!

If you’ve ever wanted to give your C64 some accurate timekeeping and simultaneously give it some more nerd cred, make sure to check out the Clockwork64 product page — and also check out the other Commodore peripherals made by The Dark Forest!

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For many years the go-to budget handheld radio of choice for the amateur radio curious (or even the ham aficionado) was the humble Baofeng. It’s fair to say that, like them or loathe them, the Baofeng and in particular the UV5-R model has probably been the most prevalent hardware gateway into amateur radio for many. However, you may have seen that there is a new contender on the block, the Quansheng UV-K5. In its standard form, the Quansheng UV-K5 has much to boast about, but there are some amazing hacks and mods to be done to this radio, both in hardware and firmware. This pre-modified Quansheng UV-K5 has had some of the more complex mods completed on it already making it an exciting choice for radio fun!

Out of the box, a standard Quansheng UV-K5 covers the 70cm and 2m ranges but this modded version has a replacement SI4732 chip installed which opens up the radio to HF bands. Of course, this requires a firmware change which is all completed and ready to go. While Jasonskits QRP is in the radio they have also done a couple of other popular mods changing the antenna inductor and a fix to increase the audio quality from stock.

It’s worth reading around the amateur radio communities to see the astonishing amount that has been done with this little handheld and also to read up about its HF capabilities after these mods, but for $45 it’s an amazing amount of technology in your hand!

Just a reminder: it’s illegal to broadcast on amateur bands without an amateur license. If you want to become a radio amateur, the process is usually quite easy! Simply do a web search for the name of your country and “radio amateur license” and you should find the entity responsible for licensing. In most countries, radio amateurs are mostly self-policing, so amateurs with experience can administer the exam to prospective amateurs, usually with minimal or no cost! Be sure to also check out the amateur radio society for your country (almost all countries have one!) as they will have lots of information and guidance on how to get into the hobby.

73 MW6CYK

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We unashamedly love USB-C and it’s fabulous to see all manner of USB-C projects across the Tindieverse. In a ground-up project though, it can sometimes be a little tricky to integrate USB-C, particularly when aiming for USB Power Delivery (PD) charge spec at 65W. It’s nice to have options to simplify this for prototyping. A great option is this Type-C USB PD 65W Fast Charging Module.

This module can receive an input voltage anywhere between 8V and 32V DC, with the obvious caveat that if you intend to trigger the 20V fast charge mode, the input voltage needs to be higher than 20V. It has automatically selected output options with 5V, 9V and 12V at 3A and 20V at 3.25A. There is input over- and under-voltage protection plus input/output over-current and over-temperature protection.

In the no-load state, the device draws less than 3mA so this is perfect for power-saving modes. The device is supplied with the PCB fully assembled. There are handy options available such as a heatsink; optionally you can have short wires soldered to the device making it easier for you to get up and running.

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With the resurgence of retro computing over the past couple of years, a lot of hobbyists want to hack their own firmware or play around with learning assembly for various microcontrollers. This inevitably requires some sort of storage medium. Electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) chips are common and inexpensive now, but programmers for them can be quite expensive. This awesome little kit uses a Pico, 74HC245 and a ZIF socket to create a versatile and easy-to-use programmer!

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, EPROM chips were common, but because they needed to be exposed to UV to be erased, the code->debug->refine cycle could take a long time. They also required high programming voltages, sometimes upwards of 20V. Modern EEPROM can be electrically erased in a few hundred milliseconds, and fully programmed in just a few seconds. They also don’t require any programming voltages, just 5V during both reading and writing.

Note that the Pico is a 3.3V device, which is why the 74HC245 bus transceiver is used to safely interface with the EEPROM. Also, because this board doesn’t generate the high voltages needed to program EPROMs, it can’t write to them (though reading them shouldn’t be a problem). The design is open source, so an enterprising hacker could add a small boost converter circuit to enable programming EPROMs if needed! Check out the product page and the video below for more info.

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I both love and hate the ubiquitous CR2032 coin cell. It’s such a great package that is a “just enough” power option for many small projects. The CR2032 is a mainstay of #badgelife and the pulsing heart of many a small IoT node, however, there must be an awful lot of them in landfill sites and we should try and reduce that as much as possible.

One great option could be this CR2032 Adapter. It’s a neat little design,  that emulates a CR2032 but is a wired solution. It features an onboard surface mount LM1117 so if this adapter is fed a 5V supply it happily supplies a nice regulated 3V3. We can imagine this would be really useful for static displays of projects needing a long power supply perhaps from a USB power bank.  In fact, the project creator mentions in the product listing that they were asked to make a ‘desk mounted’ version of the Phillips Hue dimmer control units, originally powered by a CR2032. We can imagine this making a very neat job to convert them to a continuous supply.

The CR2032 adapter is supplied fully assembled with you only having to solder wires to the large and clearly labelled plus and minus pads. If you’ve got some devices that seem to chew through CR2032 batteries, consider giving this little device a try!

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There have been many projects over the last 5-10 years to introduce new languages to the embedded development space. While they still haven’t made huge inroads against C/C++ in the professional embedded development world, in the hobbyist world projects like Micro/CircuitPython and Espruino have strong followings. Well, you can now add Swift to that list! Yes, the Apple-created but now fully open-source language has made its way into the embedded sphere, thanks to the SwiftIO Mainboard and the SwiftIO Playground!

Using a combination of Swift, the Zephyr RTOS and a powerful i.MX RT1062 microcontroller, the basic development system uses Visual Studio Code and a library simply called SwiftIO. The communication with the board is all built into the Visual Studio Code extension created by the developers. Once your code is ready, simply compile and hit the download button, and the code is programmed into the board and starts executing!

The benefit of higher-level languages like Swift is in prototyping speed and ease of use. It’s straightforward to quickly sketch out your ideas, even complex ones, and let the library handle the nitty-gritty complexity behind the scenes. This can make getting a new project up and running extremely fast, with fewer debug cycles and often easier-to-read code.

The SwiftIO Playground Kit includes the main board and a huge number of sensors and actuators to play with, all housed in a nice case. As delivered, all the components are connected via the carrier PCB, allowing you to get started right away without having to wire up a single jumper. If you later decide to use just a few components in a project, they all easily snap out of the PCB and then can be connected with common 4-pin JST PH connectors (aka Grove/STEMMA connectors).

If you’re a Swift expert and have wanted to get into the world of embedded electronics, this looks like a great way to get started!

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