We are always on the lookout for interesting little interface doohickeys! This small button cluster caught our eye as it looks really neat and could add a touch of industrial design to your next project. The Navigator Plus is simply 5 buttons on a PCB. The buttons are neatly clustered to create a circular array with a button in the centre. Each of the outer buttons has an arrow marker and the centre button has a dot. Each of these acts as a diffused window to 5 individual white LEDs built into the module. Each button has a broken-out pin and an internal pull-up resistor. The other side of eac ..read more

Who doesn’t love a good 286 motherboard? Screaming along at up to 25MHz, powering through floating-point workloads with a 287 co-processor, addressing multiple megabytes of RAM! What an absolute powerhouse! Well, if you want to power that powerhouse, you’ll either need to find and restore an AT power supply from the time or generate the required -5V that was removed when AT became ATX. The Voltage Blaster from PCRestoration does exactly that! It plugs into the ISA backplane and generates the -5V rail that many ISA cards require. And as a nice touch, it has LEDs showing each power rail so you ..read more

Pentesters and security researchers have all sorts of neat gadgets for practicing their trade. A popular tool are USB dongles that can quickly enter text and mouse movements at a completely inhuman rate. This can be used to exploit security holes during a physical pentest, or it can be used for totally innocuous purposes. The PicoUSB is an inexpensive, Pico-based version of the original device, called the Rubber Ducky. While the PicoUSB is based on the concept of the Rubber Ducky, it uses a slightly different syntax for its scripts. Make sure to check out the GitHub repo to see some example c ..read more

When it comes to LEDs Tindie is well served! We see lots of different addressable RGB LED projects on here and it’s nice to think Tindie is helping bring a little brightness and colour to the world. At the very very small end of RGB LED products, we spotted these excellent MicroMatrix panels. The MicroMatrix panels are sold as a pack of 4 which are thankfully pre-assembled as these tiny 1.5mm square addressable LEDs would be a challenge to hand solder! Each individual panel is populated as an 8*8 LED display. The LEDs are SK6805-EC15 which are WS2812 compatible, meaning most NeoPixel code wil ..read more

The new and improved version of the CardClock is not only stuffed with more LEDs, but it now has a gorgeous swappable wooden front plate. The circular LED array on the left shows time in a traditional analog clock style, and the right-hand 223 RGB LED array shows the time digitally with all sorts of crazy patterns and colours! Not only is it roughly the size of a credit card, meaning it can be used just about anywhere, but it’s powered by USB using the included 90-degree USB cable. This makes a nice and neat appearance (though it’d be cool to have the option of having the cable exit rearward ..read more

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 ..read more

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 relat ..read more

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 bo ..read more

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 ..read more

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 Quans ..read more