New LiPo/LiFePO4 charger on Tindie

Frustrated with the cheap/common options for LiPo/LiFePO4 charging I've made a breakout for the BQ25186 so I could use it in a few prototypes.

The official TI evaluation board was impractically large and I needed a few to work with, so I made a batch. I've got plenty left over so I've put them up on Tindie as a product.

The BQ25186 is a double-edged sword: it offers pretty much complete control of the charging of the attached cell over I²C, but you must set/check that configuration any time your device starts. I've written and Arduino library for this as it's a likely use case for small hobby projects.

It does power path management and cell protection with control of power to the device over I²C or with a push button. So you get a soft on/off switch as well.

Another big difference over the cheap boards is that the USB connector has D-/D+ routed through to the headers so you can connect them to your dev board for programming etc. over a single cable.

I'm looking forward to using these in a few projects.

More Kinect RGB-D conversion breakouts

We've decided to make up a small batch of Kinect breakouts to gauge interest.

As we've stock of both the donor Kinects and the necessary components it seems a gamble worth taking.

They'll be on Tindie fairly soon, once the enclosure design is finalised.

ESP32-CAM Backpack

Our ESP32-CAM Backpack is now ready for sale on Tindie.

This is designed specifically for making the popular ESP32-CAM development board easier to use in battery powered projects.

Kinect RGB-D conversion breakout

The original Microsoft Kinect is rather old now, but they are still of interest when building low cost robotics projects as they're a very affordable way to get an RGB-D depth camera.

The downside is that they are most definitely not designed for anything other than their original purpose, needing a chunky 12v supply and being rather bulky.

Other people in the Open Source Community did the groundwork in working out how to strip down Kinects long ago to remove the pose detection processor and reduce it to just the RGB-D depth camera.

We've gone through this process ourselves and made a scratch built power supply and USB connection in the past but decided to develop a small breakout that makes the end result tidier. Not being a priority the boards have languished for months but today we finally put one together.

We're not convinced this is viable as a product but it works and was a fun exercise. We're going to build a few units for our own upcoming robotics projects. With used Kinects being almost throwaway cheap you can afford to add one to a project and just leave it in place, unlike modern machine vision cameras.