Tindie

If you are looking for a challenging soldering project, then the FemFemFemto necklace/keychain kit might be a good choice! It uses the BGA package version of the 555, 3 0402 resistors, 2 0402 LEDs. and a huge (by comparison) 1206 tantalum capacitor.

If you’ve never done solder paste/hot air soldering before, then this might be a bit tricky. Thankfully, the components involved are very inexpensive, so if you wreck something, ordering replacements is not a big deal. As the sellers suggests, use some Kapton (polyamide) tape to hold the board down and to cover the parts you don’t want solder on.

Use good-quality, fresh solder paste, with liquid flux if needed. As long as you get a decent glob of solder on each pad, the miracle of hot-air reflow will take over and all the pads will get reflowed, with the solder resist helping “pull” all the solder together. You’ll suddenly see all the parts “snap” into place once the solder melts. If you get any shorts under the BGA, this can sometimes be solved by adding more liquid flux, reflowing, and gently tapping/pushing the BGA. A very steady hand is needed for this. However, unlike most BGA packages, this one has all the solder balls at the edge of the chip, which will actually make it a lot easier to solder by hand, and decreases the likelihood of shorts. Remember that BGA packages already have solder balls on them — you don’t need to apply solder paste to the BGA footprint. Just put lots of liquid flux and heat it with your hot air gun.

Once you are done, you have (probably) the smallest 555 LED flasher kit ready to put on a necklace or keychain! It’s battery powered, and the SR521 batteries themselves are quite tiny. They will fit on the back in the much easier to solder surface-mount battery holder. I would recommend soldering these on using a normal soldering iron after you’ve completed the front side.

A very cool little trinket to test your reflow skills with! Wear it with hacker pride.

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By now, if you know MadLab, you know what you’re gonna be in for! Their electronics gadgets are always totally out of the box ideas which deliver sounds and performance options like no other independent maker. The Funky Drummer kit is their latest release which incorporates a host of 8-Bit drum sounds which can be triggered and played by external sources!

The Funky Drummer features 40 Drum sounds, playing at a super lo-fi 11kHz sample rate, in line with early samplers and the dawn of digital playback. It has 16 rhythms divided into 12 preset patterns and the space for 4 user created ones – which can contain a whopping 64 drum events per beat! Think Portasound or PSR keyboards and you’ll be in the right sonic ballpark – it sounds fat and funky!

The Funky Drummer comes in kit form, with all the components you need to get going. It’s powered by DC power or PP3 Battery – and sends out a mono signal via 3.5 mm jack. You can adjust the playback tempo and engage a metronome so you know exactly where to drop the beat.

MadLab is based in Edinburgh, Scotland and has provided some demo sounds and rhythms for your listening pleasure. Visit their store to see more madcap musical goodies!

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With concerns about the transmission of COVID-19 at the forefront of society’s collective consciousness, UV light—especially the UV-C range—has been put forth as a possible solution. But how does one produce UV light indoors? UV LEDs of course!

For this purpose, prolific Tindarian Bobricius has come up with an LED module with a single 275nm UV-C light onboard. It includes the proper resistor to keep it functioning properly via a 9V power source, making it easy to implement.

While it may be effective, the listing notes that it is untested on viruses and bacteria. You’ll of course want to use it appropriately based on that information, and also note that it can be harmful to skin and eyes.

So why then did Bobricius make this contraption? As in so many works of science fiction, he had been dreaming of a radiation killing module. Now perhaps such a device can be used for good. Notably, there is a significant discount for orders of more than one, so perhaps a “killer array” would be a better option than a single source of radiation in this case!

Of course, makers aren’t just on the germ-offensive these days. As seen here, there’s been a huge push to produce PPE, especially during early shortages of a few months ago.

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While many people are still using the old, steady ATmega324 and its derivatives, Atmel (and now Microchip) have not stopped advancing their designs. A couple of years ago, we got the tinyAVR 0/1 series, as well as the megaAVR 0 series. Now they have come out with another new line: the megaAVR DA-series. These are similar to the previous megaAVT 0, but with a higher clock rate, lower power consumption, improved peripherals, and a renewed focus on capacitive touch buttons & sliders. An awesome set of simple dev boards for the AVR DA series has been released by Azzy’s Electronics.

With up to 128k of Flash, and 32k of SRAM, these are much beefier than the old standby ATmega324. They can run up to 24MHz (and, during testing, apparently up to 32MHz without issue) while having up to 55 GPIO, a 12-bit ADC, 10-bit DAC, and a dedicated peripheral touch controller that can support up to 529 segments in mutual capacitance mode! I highly recommend checking out the full datasheet for the AVR128DA – you’ll be impressed with how feature-packed they are.

Azzy’s Electronics have created an Arduino-compatible bootloader core called DxCore which allows easy programming with the Arduino environment. They are also working on getting the official Arduino Optiboot bootloader ported to this new architecture, which should be (fingers crossed) coming soon. Most existing Arduino libraries that work with the megaAVR 0 series should work with the DA series. Azzy’s has created a new NeoPixel library for these boards that has an identical interface to the Adafruit NeoPixel library, but which supports higher speeds.

These development boards are, in my opinion, exactly what development boards should be. They break out all the pins of the microcontroller; they have an on-board voltage regulator; an LED and a button; and the programming header broken out. That’s it! This is important, as dev boards should be inexpensive enough that they can be embedded into projects, or treated as “expendable” and hacked to pieces if needed. I do love playing with the super-high-end development kits, but having an inexpensive alternative like this is super important for actual day-to-day development. Kudos to Azzy’s for making a great, inexpensive and simple-to-use dev board for this exciting new series of chips!

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As someone who recently bought a house, I have been learning a lot of new things very quickly. From minor repairs, to DIY projects, to plumbing and septic systems, it’s a lot to absorb. Like most people, I also have an inherent fear of a pipe bursting one day and flooding my kitchen.

This LoRaWAN Pipe Pressure Sensor caught my eye as something that could prevent a catastrophe like that from happening. Thanks to the EM500-PP sensor, you can measure pressure from liquids or gases to monitor things like tank level and pipe leakage.

A 10-year battery life combines with LoRaWAN connectivity to ensure reliable connections from long distances. Simply turn on the NFC and attach the sensor to the area and then download the toolbox app on your smartphone to configure the sensor accordingly.

This handy method of monitoring will prevent any major leakage danger, offers shock and vibration resistance, and measures with an accuracy of less than +/-0.% FS. It also includes temperature compensation for higher accuracy.

Whether you’re a new homeowner like me, or you want to avoid having maintenance come out to fix your apartment, this is a good way to keep a digital eye on your pipes.

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Serial connections are still very prevalent today, especially in hobby electronics. In most cases, a direct connection between two systems is quite simple, but there are many gotchas that can cause issues and even damage to the connected equipment. Because many laptops and other electronics can have a trickle of current from the AC source (because of the class Y capacitor across the isolating transformer), if the two connected devices have different ground potentials, current can flow through this capacitor (or, in non-isolated power supplies, directly) and can easily cause damage to the connected devices.

I ran into this issue with an FTDI breakout board once — I connected it to a device on a different circuit from my laptop, and suddenly there was a puff of smoke and the ground track on the PCB vapourized. This luckily cleared the fault, but in certain cases, you could end up with substantial damage. Amazingly, after I repaired that trace, the breakout board still worked, but the whole situation could have been avoided. This is the kind of situation where you don’t know you need it until you need it!

If you happen to own an isolation transformer, that’s great — but these are bulky and can be expensive. However, you can pick up this fully isolated USB-to-serial-to-USB device from Geppetto Electronics! The isolation is provided by four Toshiba TLP2270 optical isolation ICs. These are capable of speeds up to 20 Mbaud, as well as differential voltages of up to 5000 Vrms!

Instead of the ubiquitous FTDI FT232 USB to serial chips, Geppetto has instead used the CY7C65213A from Cypress (now Infineon); chosen, in part, because the Cypress chip uses a generic driver and is therefore safe from any “FTDI-gate” type of issue. These have an almost identical feature set to the FTDI chips, but are about $2 less expensive in single quantity. If you wanted isolated USB to TTL serial, you could tap into the signal between the isolators and the Cypress chip quite easily.

A great choice for a low-cost, well-designed board like this! Pick one up and help protect your serial comms from ground potential differences.

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Generating sounds is the core element of every modular synth, with a number of established waveforms to start off with – sine, sawtooth, triangle and pulse waves. The BLM JPJFET VCO is a sawtooth-based voltage controlled oscillator, with a design based on an unnamed famous vintage Roland synth using modern equivalent parts.

The JPJFET VCO is ideal for serving up searing leads and analogue bass, with possiblilities to morph between sawtooth and pulse waves operating at -5 and +5 volts. Plug into the front panel to access features like PWM (Pulse Width Modulation), Oscillator Sync, Octave (1v/octave), Linear Modulation and Exponential Modulation – to sculpt the sound and generate the core sound you need. Pitch the VCO to your taste with tune, fine tune and overall modualtion controls and you have a poweful modular monster in your rack for only 6HP of space!

No need to solder yourself, this module comes fully made with tiny SMD components in situ, just plug and play! The documentation is available from the company website, which outlines functions of the unit as well as instructions on how to calibrate it.

The BLM JPJFET VCO is sold by Blue Lantern Modules who are based in the USA and are producing a growing number of exciting modular goodies. Look out for more soon!

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There are lots of ways to display data from the cloud, but this adorable Macintosh-esque display device from Kameleon definitely wins in the looks department! The retro-style case with a bright and clear, easy-to-read display make it an excellent choice for displaying many types of data from the cloud.

The kit comes with the 3D-printed case, as well as a Kameleon Core board (an STM32F411 development board), an ESP8266 module (the ESP-01), a 1.44″ colour TFT display (ST7735), a tiny breadboard, and rainbow jumper wires to connect it all together.

The Kameleon board runs using JerryScript, meaning it is a very beginner-friendly way to program a microcontroller. The Kameleon even has its own web IDE, along with a simple way to upload code using their Kameleon Agent program. Basically, they have created an entire development ecosystem for their board, which is amazing! The documentation is easy to read, with many examples and a full description of the API they have written.

The rest of the kit is also easy to use in combination with the Kameleon board. The ST7735 display has a bunch of example code, as well as an API you can use with JerryScript. The Kameleon API also has graphics routines and there’s also a library for the ESP8266. All the libraries for this kit can be found here. I’m seriously impressed with the documentation and examples, getting up to speed is very easy!

There are a few example projects provided to help you get started. I particularly like the look of the Particulate Monitor with its smiling face. Unfortunately, that particular project is only supported by a Korean API, and the documentation is also in Korean. But the code could be a jumping-off point for you to start from; just find an API relevant to your region that provides similar data.

If you need to display data from the cloud, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better (or more adorable) display! If you just want to play around with the Kameleon Core, it’s also available separately.

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Pushing the boundaries of sound is what makes modular so different from making music with conventional gear; putting it closer to scientific experimentation than arranging a concerto! Step up the Monotropa V3, a four-band feedback EQ module intent on sonic adventure, noise generation and drone dystopia – for the bigger bass and resonant highs your eurorack demands!

The Monotropa performs primarily as a signal processor – giving you the chance to sculpt and scramble your audio signals across four separate frequency bands. Feedback has an evil edge to it, resulting in extreme distortion and huge harmonics added to any input signal – perfect for synths, bass and lead sounds. It has 2 inputs, 2 outputs and controls for feedback, gain, and each EQ band volume. It’ll mangle audio and CV and even self-oscillates with no input signal to act as an unhinged VCO!

This third version comes as a DIY kit, with all the components and panels you need to get it together. The Bill Of Materials, Documentation and Build Guide have all been made available for you to find out more.

The Monotropa is sold by ReverseLandFill who are based in the Netherlands. They’ve put together numerous soundcloud demos as well as the bassdrum example video below:

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When I first saw this, I immediately thought back to the days when my BlackBerry was with me 24/7. Fond memories of BlackBerry Messenger came pouring over me. I was so glad to see a Canadian company doing so well! But then, well… Android and iOS basically took over completely, and now there are probably hundreds of millions of BlackBerry phones sitting in e-cycle plants and desk drawers worldwide.

However, this super cool FeatherWing uses new old stock BlackBerry parts to create a user interface! The keyboard is from the BlackBerry Q10. BlackBerry keyboards were renowned for their easy typing. Even modern smartphone touchscreen keyboards that have all sorts of optimizations to avoid touching the wrong letter still can’t keep up with a good old physical QWERTY. There are 4 separate buttons above the keyboard, as well as a four-way rocker switch with a button in the center. The whole thing is very reminiscent of the Curve line of BlackBerrys, with the exception of the navigation ball.

This is simply an awesome way to add a great user interface to any project using a Feather MCU board. It is compatible with all of the Feathers released by Adafruit as well as many third-party Feathers, such as the Giant Board and the Orange Crab.

Oh, it also includes an SD card slot, a Stemma QT/Qwicc connector, a NeoPixel, and a keyboard FIFO buffer. Plus, of course, the 320×240 16-bit colour LCD! Interface it with a LoRa Feather and you can make one of those doomsday text communicators. Or use a FONA Feather, and make… a phone! I will definitely be picking up one of these to use with my HUZZAH ESP8266 feather to control my home automation system.

And the best part — it’s certified Open Source Hardware! This means that all the software & hardware files are available in formats which allow editing and reuse — even commercially.

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