When I’m feeling blue about the current state of the web, tech vendors, and enshittification, I go onto sites like Tindie to renew my faith in humanity.

This is the BlinkHAT, the latest piece of hardware from Jurrasic Computing out of France. They make some of the highest-quality and most fun retrocomputer hardware I’ve ever seen, including the ZuluSCSI-based SCSIKnife, internal battery holders with Happy Macs, DIMMs, and other purple PCB wonders. But this may top them all:

From the listing:

BlinkHATs is a simple visual tool using LEDs to quickly check if logic signals are present on a particular PLCC integrated circuit. This tool is specifically designed to troubleshoot and rapidly identify connection problems that can occur on vintage computers due to solder joint cracking and PCB corrosion due to leaking capacitors and batteries. BlinkHAT simply clips on a PLCC package, any LED not lit for a critical signal will potentially indicate a severed connection to be investigated.

This is… beautiful! I’m not normally for “RGB”, but I would almost have this permanently attached. The care and attention to detail here are stunning, just as all their stuff is. Makes me want to get a Macintosh Classic just to run something like this.

I wonder if I could somehow convince them to make one for my Atari ST, or my i387 FPU? :)