Tindie

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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The Commodore 64 (and its siblings the VIC-20 and Commodore 128) were some of the best-selling home computers of all time. Their appeal has never fully waned, and many C64 collectors still actively create new hardware and software for these beloved machines. The 1541 floppy drive was one of the most popular ways to transfer files between Commodore machines (in North America, at least — the UK tended to use cassette tapes more). However, 1541s that are still around are getting old, requiring maintenance and know-how to keep them running in tip-top shape. Naturally, collectors have come up with solutions to these problems, and the Pi1541 Nano is a particularly attractive design. Because it uses the Pi Zero, it’s very small, and with the OLED interface, it’s very easy to use — assuming you can get your hands on a Pi Zero, that is.

The 1541 used an unusual design. It essentially had another entire computer inside, making the C64 file routines much simpler as it didn’t have to deal with the low-level floppy interface. This had the downside of making the 1541 very expensive, and incompatible with any other machines. However, the upside is the protocol is quite simple, allowing a low-cost, low-power computer like the Pi Zero to emulate it. This makes life much easier for those who still use their C64s a lot, and saves wear and tear on the floppy drive and the floppies themselves. With the (relatively) huge amount of memory on a Pi Zero, you can hold thousands and thousands of 1541 floppy images and swap between them easily with the OLED screen and button interface. Also, there is an option to include the DIN cable needed to connect this to your C64, if you didn’t already have one!

The small size makes me think it would be possible to actually embed one of these inside a C64, if you were willing to cut out a hole for the screen and buttons. I know most collectors wouldn’t be keen on doing so, but it’s something I might give a try! Then you would have an all-in-one C64 system with no external parts. Note that the Pi1541 Nano does not have a pin for the SRQ line, meaning it will not work with a Commodore 128. However, the original Pi1541 will.

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Eurorack modules come in many forms, with VCOs, VCA, VCFs and other modules which don’t happen to start with VC! Replications of classic units are available alongside brand new designs – and the Chorus (Eurorack PCB Set) is an example of the former. It’s a tribute to David Ward-Hunt who created the waveform multiplier unit included in the Digisound-80 synthesiser. Now you can feed this classic chorus with the signal path of your choice!

Chorus is a superb effect to layer onto lead vocals, synth bass and anything that needs audio excitement. This particular chorus takes six versions of the input saw wave, each slightly out of phase with the original signal for wide-band frequency effects! The amount of phase from each one changes thanks to six trapezoid oscillators, resulting in a richly morphing thickness and texture added to your sound.

Above is a photo of the completed build. This particular kit comes with a screen printed front panel and a high quality PCB, so sourcing the components is required for completing the build. An assembly guide and a BOM have been provided to assist you.

This classic chorus is created by PMFoundations who are based in the USA and offer a plethora of modular goodies from their Tindie store!

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There are untold numbers of Raspberry Pis running 24/7 across the globe. Some of them are collecting data remotely and sending it back to a cloud server; some are media servers; some are DNS servers like the PiHole. Pis are used in ways that most people wouldn’t normally use their computers or laptops — they are often treated more like a server.

Because the Pi’s entire storage is Flash-based, sudden power cuts are not good. Filesystems have been designed to try and prevent corruption, but it still happens. All that work you spent getting it set up just the way you like it suddenly won’t boot at all! This happens in the professional server market too — only they have these magic devices called Uninterruptible Power Supplies that provide power to a device when the mains power goes out.

Now you can bring this often bulky & expensive technology to your little Raspberry Pi! The jUPS is designed to be easy to use, efficient, and reliable. Paired with any 12V sealed lead acid battery (the battery of choice for commercial UPS systems as well) it becomes a power supply that can, depending on your design, run the Pi for hours or even days. Or, you can have it tell the Pi to gracefully shut down until power comes back. Or a combination of the two! It’s easy to customize the voltage trigger levels, so you can tweak it until it’s just the way you like it.

The reason this product caught my eye is I have a Pi which runs 24/7 controlling a few things around my house. We don’t get power cuts often, but when we do it’s always irritating to not have the Pi running. I’ve looked into getting a commercial UPS, but they’re often expensive and not designed to be end-user serviceable, meaning battery replacement will void your warranty. This is a perfect solution for anyone running a Pi (or, for that matter, any small electronic device that runs on 5V!) which needs 24/7 reliability.

It connects to the Pi using either a USB cable, or terminal blocks (if you want to connect to the Pi header). It does conform to the Pi Hat standard, so it will fit perfectly on top of any full-size Raspberry Pi, and comes with mounting hardware. The only downside is that it doesn’t connect to the Pi header directly, and if you mount it on top it would be blocking the header, requiring a ribbon cable. However, you could just as easily mount it below the Pi for the very same reason, so the flexibility is nice. It looks like the included standoffs are long enough to mount it on the bottom of the Pi, but I haven’t tried it yet and so you might need longer standoffs.

It even integrates with Node-RED for monitoring, data logging, and configuration! This is a feature that many commercial UPS’s don’t support. For the cost of this board and a battery, you can have power through any power outage. Oh, it also has an extra USB out, so you can charge your phone, too!

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A long way from giant synth bass lines and imposing analogue drums resides the lighter end of the music tech spectrum. The Solar Baby Chime behaves like a wind chime but is actually powered by light, and emits a gentle tinkling in an organic and soothing way – which apparently can transfix and mesmerise a baby, hence the name!

This unique and compact device contains a red motorized butterfly inside a glass bell decorated with flowers. It looks like a Furin wind chime, but is powered by the light of the sun and other sources – and will respond to 400-1000 lux. As it runs on solar power, it’ll chime for years and require no batteries or maintenance. It weighs an ounce and is around three inches wide.

It’s ideal to be hung in a window or from a ceiling but it’s not recommended to be placed outside. For the technically minded, the Solar Baby Chime comprises of a solar cell, a pager motor and some electronics on a OSHpark board.

The Solar Baby Chime is sold by SolaBile who are based in the USA, and have a patent pending on the design! It’s their first product on Tindie so keep your eyes and ears open for more.

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If you need to log voltage over time, this does the trick. The Voltmeter with USB interface designed by Tindie Seller Digital Measure is a small module that measures voltage on a set of screw terminals and sends the data to a PC via the USB connection.

Measurements are made with an ADC using an optical isolator, so you don’t need to worry about transient voltage making it back to your USB port. There is also a voltage divider and an EMI filter at the input of the A/D converter.

All of this convenience extends to the software side of things as well. The PC software is a simple windows application that will display the value and even lets you save the data in a CSV file format. The API is based on the .NET framework if you choose to roll your own software.

Finally, the USB works as a Human Interface Device (HID), utilizing drivers already present in Windows. So once you plug in the USB, it is immediately ready for use!

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If you’ve done any significant experimentation with Arduino and Raspberry Pi robotics, you’ve undoubtedly come across the HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor. These inexpensive units provide an easy way to allow your robot to see (or literally, hear) what’s in front of it. If you want to use a number of sensors facing in different directions, things get a bit more complicated, in part because they can be difficult to mount.

To solve this problem, Alastair Young, aka Red Hunter created the Trimount bracket system, which staggers 3 of these sensors on a PCB at 45 degrees. With the help of standoffs, two of the sensor units are mounted underneath the third in a nice compact package. Wiring is broken out on the back to allow connection with RC-style jumpers.

As illustrated in the video below, this arrangement can be implemented with a robot in order to calculate how it’s approaching a wall. This means it can make adjustments and avoid crashes much more gracefully than when using a single sensor. Four boards are included, so you’ll be able to cover the corners of a rectangular sensing setup as shown in the video below.

As for how you can easily collect readings from 12 or more sensors, Red Hunter has you covered there as well, with the Octosonar X2 that we covered in 2018.

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I’ve been a huge fan of the PIC32 series of microcontrollers since they launched several years ago. They brought together some of the best features of the PIC microcontrollers (pin remapping, great development environment) with the power and speed of the 32-bit MIPS M4K architecture. I’ve used the original PIC32MX series of chips extensively.

Almost 4 years ago, the low-power, low-cost variant of the PIC32MX was announced, called PIC32MM. They use the microMIPS architecture, and have much lower power consumption, as well as lower BOM cost per 1k chips. Of course, some performance is lost, but interestingly they added some peripherals that the low-end PIC32MX chips didn’t have —  a DAC, a Configurable Logic Cell (basically a single macrocell from a CPLD), as well as LIN and I2S support.

This tiny, well-made PIC32MM development board hits a perfect sweet spot for these microcontrollers. It breaks out a lot of pins. It’s breadboard-friendly, unlike most development boards from Microchip. It’s specifically designed to help develop USB applications on the PIC32MM, which is nice. The GitHub has a ton of examples for interfacing to this board with Python over USB. By default, it uses the HID profile for communication, but you can, of course, edit the firmware to use any USB profile you want.

It has some nice protection features, including overvoltage and overcurrent protection on the incoming USB power supply.

Programming is done with a PICKIT or MPLAB Snap, or any compatible programmer. Development can be done in MPLAB X or by using Makefiles that interface with the xc32 compiler.

This is a great little development board to kickstart your USB applications with the PIC32MM series! The board comes with the PIC32MM0256GPM028 but any of the QFN chips in that series will fit on the footprint. I have it on good authority that a “lite” version of this board is in the works, that will be even smaller and break out more GPIO, at a reduced cost. It will forgo the “nice to have” things like OVP and use a PTC instead of an active OCP circuit, but otherwise be quite similar.

It’s a well-designed and very neat board! Kudos to lophtware for an awesome product.

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