What ordering a Blinky Hawk will look like — before, during, and after.
Everything on this page is pending. Blinky Hawk is not yet available to order, and nothing here is a live offer. These are the terms I intend to sell under, published early so you can read them before you ever have to commit to anything. I will confirm the final wording here when orders actually open.
Want to know when that is? Join the notify list — a few emails a year at most.
Not yet. The design is finished and I am working out what a first production run looks like. The fastest way to hear about it is the notify list — that list gets told before anything else happens.
By card, through a standard hosted checkout. I will never see or store your card number. The exact payment options will be confirmed on this page when orders open.
Not finalized. If you have an opinion about what it ought to cost, there is a question about exactly that on the notify form, and the answers genuinely feed into the decision.
Everything ships from Illinois, USA. Expect somewhere between a few days and a couple of weeks between placing an order and it going out the door. These are built in small batches rather than pulled off a shelf, so the honest answer is that it depends where your order lands relative to the current batch.
I have a different full-time job, plus family. I can only sell Blinky Hawks so long as it does not interfere with those other aspects of my life. Instead of not selling it at all, I am selling it on the terms I am able to.
Tell me when you order and I will prioritize it at no extra charge. If the date is not realistic I would rather say so up front than take your money and disappoint you.
To be confirmed. Blinky Hawk contains a rechargeable lithium cell, which carries real packaging, labeling and carrier restrictions — particularly by air. I would rather work out exactly which destinations I can ship to properly than promise everywhere and fail. The list of countries will be published here before orders open.
Yes — any order can be cancelled at any point before it ships, for a full refund, no questions asked. Email me and it is done. Because these are built in batches, there may be a real gap between ordering and shipping, and you should not feel trapped by it.
Thirty days, no questions asked. If you are not happy with it for any reason, send it back within 30 days of delivery for a full refund of the purchase price. You do not need to justify the decision to me.
Return shipping is at your expense. If a unit comes back damaged well beyond normal handling, or with parts missing, I may refund a portion based on its condition rather than the whole amount — but that is the exception, not the default.
That is not a return, that is my problem to fix. Email me with a photo and I will repair, replace or refund it — see the warranty below. You should not be out of pocket for something that arrived broken.
Very much, if you are willing to say. I cannot improve the thing without hearing what went wrong, and a return with an explanation attached is worth more to me than the sale was.
There is nothing inside a Blinky Hawk that is designed to wear out. It is a small circuit in a solid housing, and I expect a unit that is treated reasonably to keep working into the indefinite future.
The formal warranty period is one year from delivery. If something goes wrong within that window, you are entitled to a refund, a repair, or a replacement.
That one-year figure is the commitment I am prepared to put in writing, not a prediction about when it will fail. If a unit gives up at fourteen months I would still like to hear about it — both because it probably should not have, and because that is exactly the sort of thing I need to know to build the next batch better.
Report problems directly to me at Nick@OIHDesigns.com. There is no ticket system and no phone tree; it is one person reading the email.
Yes. The external, losable, breakable parts — the housing, the stacking banana plugs, the short lead — can be replaced individually rather than replacing the whole unit. Depending on which part it is, the cost is often minimal or nothing at all. Email me and describe what happened.
Yes, and doing so does not void anything. The housing comes apart with ordinary screws and the full schematic is published. If you would rather fix it than ship it back and forth, that is a perfectly good outcome as far as I am concerned — tell me what failed and I will help if I can.
Within the warranty period that is covered like any other failure. Outside it, contact me about a replacement cell rather than binning the unit.
No. There is no gasket and no ingress rating. Absolutely do not submerge Blinky Hawk, and do not use it in wet conditions. Wipe it down with a dry cloth and nothing wetter.
If you suspect water has got inside, open the top and allow it to dry completely before any further use.
All of it. The full schematic and the firmware source are published, deliberately. You are putting this across your probes; you are entitled to know exactly what is on the other side of them.
The current batch uses a Seeed Studio XIAO RA4M1, set up for the Arduino IDE. Please note that this may change in the future. The firmware manual covers the configuration keys and the serial command reference for the current build.
Yes — please contact me directly for that. The pinout fits the Seeed Studio XIAO / Adafruit QT Py footprint, but with a few jumper wires you could adapt it to any board and give yourself, for example, Bluetooth for the beeps, or a process-control application.
Yes. Change the configuration over USB, or reflash it with your own firmware entirely. It is your hardware. Doing so does not void the warranty on the physical device, though I obviously cannot warrant code I did not write.
Yes. You can use it by itself if you do not need to know the value of a voltage beyond the fact that it is above ABS ~0.6 V. With some programming you could rewrite the firmware to give different numbers of beeps or blinks for different voltage levels, if you wanted that.
Used this way, the banana plugs that normally go into your meter should have the cover installed.
No. I may make design changes to improve performance and/or reduce cost. These changes will be documented, and the schematic I publish will always be the schematic for the device I am selling at the time.
Build one for yourself, absolutely — that is part of why the design is published. Selling them is a different question: Blinky Hawk is patent pending, so publishing the schematic is not a grant of manufacturing rights. If you are thinking about producing these commercially, email me and we will talk about it rather than guess at each other.
Either way, please do not use the Blinky Hawk name on your own work, or present it as coming from OIH Designs.
If something here is unclear, missing, or seems unreasonable, tell me. It is a short page and it will get better with pushing.