 Greetings random friends. Today I received a box from HackerBoxes.com which is one of those subscription services where they send you a box every month and it has neat stuff in it. And apparently each box is themed, so this one is called Technodactyl. I have no idea what's inside, so let's find out. Okay, it's some sort of an optical device. I don't know what that is, but it's got a circuit board on the other side. Presumably there is a camera in there maybe? Looks like this. Yeah, I don't know. Let's see, we've got some random breakout boards. This I recognize as I think a basically a spark fun level shifter. I think, yep. So this is a level shifter for shifting between 3 volts and 5 volts. And as I understand it, it's not so great for I squared C. At least it's not like truly bi-directional or maybe it is. I don't know, maybe I'm getting my level shifters backwards. Let's see, we've also got this thing. What is this? Well, it's a USB thing. And I don't know what it is, let's just open it up and find out. Digis spark. Digis spark. Okay. It's a digis spark. Neat. Alright, oh, and we've got another level shifter. We've got some desoldering, desoldering wick. Nice. Something called a nano, yes. So we've got a robot dine nano. What is that? It's basically, I think it's an Arduino nano. Okay. Oh, we've got tweezers. Those are useful. I actually kind of like the tweezers that are bent, but I actually don't have this kind. I might find a use for that. We've got some batteries, coin cells. We've got a USB extender cable. We have a plug. And we've got a chair-borne badge. Okay. Some stickers. Stickers, stickers. Another sticker, hacker boxes. That's going right on my laptop and taking it to work. And the bag that I set aside appears to be the main content. So the idea behind these things is that they give you sort of a random assortment of stuff, and you could build things with it. Kind of like Lego, almost. But there is usually a theme for each box, and presumably that's what this bag is all about. So let's see what's in the bag. Zoom in a little. Oh, and we have a note. Installation instructions of finger spinner. Okay. Interesting. So this is a fidget spinner. There's the bearing. There's the spinny thing itself, and you put LEDs on it. Ah, that's nice. I was actually playing with one of these that I found at the store for like five bucks. And it just had one row of LEDs. And so, you know, you spun it, and of course through persistence of vision, it would display various messages. And it could only display like five different patterns. So I just sort of ripped that out and connected the LEDs to wires, and then, you know, hooked it up to an Arduino and put my own message in there. Of course, the problem is that this was now connected to a huge Arduino with wires. So basically, the only thing I could do was do this with it instead of spin it. So this is actually kind of nice, because I think this is going to be one of a programmable ones. So let's see. So according to this, the chips are not known. They're just called U1. So presumably, not exactly sure what chips these are. Maybe I can pop them under the microscope and see. Well, unfortunately, these chips are completely unlabeled, except on the underside, which I think is just a lot number or a lot code. Let's see. So we've got some LEDs, and we've got some resistors, and we've got some holders for the batteries. And then there is this thing, which is the body of the fidget spinner. And then there's this. So that's interesting. This is all laser cut acrylic. So you could actually build your own if you had a laser cutter. Then, of course, you'd need the printed circuit board here. Let's see. So, yeah, it looks like the two chips go here and here. Are they even connected? They're connected to this button, but they seem to be otherwise completely independent. And if we check out the schematic, we can see that. Their only connection is basically through the button and power and ground. So I kind of suspect that this is one of those pre-programmed ones. There's a website. I can look at the website. Actually, I don't have to look at the website. I can just see over here it says, short-press the switch once to change the display mode, and long-press the switch once to change the displayed image. So presumably that's all you get, just whatever images are pre-programmed into this. Interestingly, this is different from the one that I bought because it's got two rows of LEDs, which is kind of interesting. How would they sync? Yeah, I have no idea how they would synchronize because you wouldn't really want them displaying inconsistent images. Anyway, so there's the bearing, there's the chip, so that's kind of nice. But, you know, I think this is going to be kind of interesting or useful. There's a little quality pass sticker on this for some reason. Oh, that's on some sort of a chip. And then we've got this DigiSpark. So the interesting thing is, could I hook up one of these, say, you know, on the underneath somewhere, or could I just, you know, put my own chip over here? Apparently the LEDs are Charlie Plexed, so you get 12 LEDs per microcontroller. So if you have an 8-pin microcontroller, you can stick that on there. I'm still kind of puzzled as to what this is. Is there even a part number on here? JM101B. Okay, this is actually a fingerprint optical sensor module. So I looked up JM-101B, and after a bunch of jazz-related things, I saw in the image search that there was a picture of this very circuit board. So this very circuit board. So it appears that this is a fingerprint scanner, and that's what this is for. So this plugs in right over here, I think. Pretty sure. No, it actually does not. So this actually does not fit on this. So I'm kind of wondering what this is for, or if it's just, you know, something random. So that's, I think the other thing with these hacker boxes is that they don't give you, like, absolutely everything that you need. So for example, they don't give you a breadboard. They don't give you solder, but they do give you, you know, this. Eventually, you know, you might build up a whole set of things, but, you know, they're not going to include a soldering iron in here. So they kind of assume that you have some of the basic tools. So, you know, that might be the case over here where, you know, they don't really supply this or, you know, or maybe some of these pins aren't actually used and you could just, you know, plug this in. The pin pitch seems correct. So, you know, I'm guessing maybe, you know, that's how it's supposed to go. So I'll have to look at the pin diagram. But anyway, you know, apparently it's an optical fingerprint sensor, which is interesting. Okay, well, I guess that's about it. Again, the idea behind these hacker boxes is that they give you a bunch of stuff and you can play with it and see what you can build with it. This hacker box is called Technodactyl. I guess Dactyl must refer to the fingers and this would be the Technodactyl thing, basically a fidget or finger spinner. So that's what that meant. Anyway, that's kind of neat. Tweezer is kind of nice. I could always use more desoldering braid. These batteries are kind of cool. You don't have to use them in the fidget spinner, you know, you can use it for something else. And I got an Arduino Nano and a DigiSpark and a fingerprint sensor and what else did I get? Yeah, a bunch of level shifters. So that's kind of neat. So again, a random assortment of interesting stuff.