Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Ember - A hot plate controller powered by USB-C Power Delivery
Hi, I’m Nathan, an aspiring engineer who likes to tinker with hardware. Earlier this year, I started making hardware/electronic projects through various Hack Club programs. It was perfect, but most, if not all, of my projects were being withheld due to high customs and import fees, so I wanted to change that. Most of the price was actually assembling the PCB, and looking around the internet, I discovered the wonderful invention of the hotplate, and that I could make all of my PCBs myself for more than half the cost. Now, while I could have bought one on eBay, I decided to take up the…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
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After years of making screwdrivers and teaching people to repair electronics, we just made our first electronic tool. It's been a journey for us to build while hewing to our repairable principles. We're really excited about it. It's a USB-C powered soldering iron and smart battery power hub. Super repairable, of course. Our goal is to make soldering so easy everyone can do it: https://www.ifixit.com/fixhub We didn’t want to make just another iron, so we spent years sweating the details and crafting something that met our exacting standards. This is a high-performance iron: it…
2024 · hackaday.com · its alternatives →
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Hey Hackers. This is a project I solo-developed that turns completed PCB assemblies into an easy to use boardview with some accompanying boardscans. There are lots of easier and better ways of doing this, but this is an experimentation to do it as cheaply as possible, with the highest quality and lowest chance of errors. The technical details are in the link. Most public boardviews are almost entirely the result of industrial espionage, other than a few encrypted subscription based software platforms that provide extensive access. The process output is released as donationware, as my main…
2024 · usoldering.com · its alternatives →
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A while back I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator (which is considered the Hello, World! of emulators and is more accurately a virtual machine since historically CHIP-8 was an interpreted language running on top of the COSMAC VIP to make game programming easier). But a few months ago I got really interested in embedded software, so decided it would be neat to port my emulator to a STM32 MCU and design a console around it as a learning experience, since CHIP-8 never existed as a physical system. I didn't know much about embedded software when I began, and even less about electronics, but I managed to…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
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3D printing is such a fascinating field of technology, so a couple months ago, I decided to take a deep dive and learn how they actually work! This took me to one of my very first PCB projects, a small, cheap, 3D printer motherboard. While it's not the most cutting edge board, I learned a lot and I fully documented my process designing it (https://github.com/KaiPereira/Cheetah-MX4-Mini/blob/master/J...), so other people can learn from my mistakes! It runs off of an STM32H743 MCU, has 4 TMC stepsticks with UART/SPI configurations,…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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The next generation of temperature controlled mugs
2019 · ember.com · its alternatives →
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A few months ago, I was inspired by this post on Reddit, titled: Food items should have QR codes that instruct the microwave exactly what to do. Like high for 2 minutes, let stand 1 minute, medium 1 minutes.. I thought this was a pretty cool idea, and that it
2013 · madebynathan.com · its alternatives →
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I love getting cool swag from hackathons and I also love designing PCB's, so when my friend asked me if I would design hackathon badges for a large game jam in singapore, I was absolutely down! The theme of overglade was a "The game jam within a game", pretty cool concept right! High schoolers from around the world were flown out to the event by hackclub after they spent about 70 hours designing their own game. These badges needed to be really cheap and simple, because we were going to manufacture about a hundred in a pretty limited amount of time. I went with a zero-power approach, which…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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PewCB▲67Vibe-routing is coming. Desktop PCB Factory is here.
Sep 2026 · pewcb.com · its alternatives →
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Discovering unexpected sophistication in everyday objects
2016 · oreilly.com · its alternatives →
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A rugged cyberdeck with network hub and SDR
2022 · hackaday.io · its alternatives →
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@MVC & @Peter_Levine discuss Dell's $67B acquisition of EMC.
2015 · soundcloud.com · its alternatives →
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Awesome electric skateboards. Like carving on a snowboard.
2014 · its alternatives →
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SparkFun▲77Bits and Pieces to Make Electronics Projects Possible
2014 · sparkfun.com · its alternatives →
- 20
E-bikes featuring classic frame designs.
2015 · faradaybikes.com · its alternatives →
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Dongle Daddy▲88An app that helps you find the right cables.
2017 · dongledaddy.com · its alternatives →
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You don't need to write C or Assembly to create electronics
2016 · oreilly.com · its alternatives →
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Hey guys, A couple weeks ago, I was in Shenzhen, China for a hackathon and on the first day, we all used the one-day PCB fabrication to make PCB badges to wear during the event. I decided to go a little crazy and make some cool 3D alchemical-cosmological badges. It's 3 PCB's stacked on-top of each other that's connected using testpoints on each board. The innerboard has a 10 cent CH32V003 MCU that powers the WS2812B neopixels on the outer rings using the testpoints and shines through using exposed soldermask. If you have any questions about how the design works, feel free to let me know!
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →