batsocks.co.uk

What it is

Batsocks is not a typical software developer tool, but a supplier of small hardware boards and kits for embedded developers and electronics hobbyists. The key product in the material is TellyMate: a Serial to TV adapter that converts serial data into PAL or NTSC composite video, displaying a 38x25 monochrome text screen on a TV. It can be used as an Arduino Shield, and there is also a Tiny TTL version for connecting to 5V TTL serial microcontrollers.

Core capabilities and ecosystem

Getting started with the TellyMate Shield is straightforward: plug it into an Arduino, then use Serial.begin(57600) and Serial.println() to output text to a TV. It supports 300 to 57k6 baud, optional auto-baud detection, VT52 and H19 control sequences, simple graphics, double-width/double-height text, and—in the Mega328 version—64 RAM-based user-defined characters plus up to 11 Flash font banks. The site also offers breadboard-friendly boards such as USB XMega PDI, as well as BatSnap camera infrared remote/timelapse kits.

Open source, documentation, and pricing

Openness is one of Batsocks’ strengths. TellyMate provides schematics, firmware source code, precompiled hex files, sample client code, Arduino sketches, and downloadable font libraries, with source materials released under a FreeBSD-style license. USB XMega PDI is also marked as open-source. However, trademark use requires explicit permission. Documentation quality is solid for a small hardware project, covering user guides, getting-started tutorials, design articles, control sequences, configuration jumper instructions, FAQs, and revision history. In terms of pricing, TellyMate Shield is £17, Tiny is £14, and USB XMega PDI is £15, but multiple products are listed as not available or Discontinued, so actual purchasability is limited.

Pros, cons, and suitable users

The strengths are its clear positioning, transparent pricing, open materials, and suitability for learning about retro video output and serial debugging displays; Arduino integration is also simple enough. The downsides are that the site’s news appears to have stopped in 2017, raising questions about maintenance activity and stock continuity; the products are explicitly not officially certified and are not considered RoHS-compliant; payment depends on PayPal, and international shipping may involve customs delays and delivery-time uncertainty.

Access from China and alternatives

The available text does not make it possible to determine whether the site is directly accessible from mainland China, so china_access can only be recorded as unknown. For Chinese users, payment, GBP settlement, and cross-border logistics may be more troublesome than access itself. If the goal is simply Arduino display output, serial debugging, or video output, alternatives include Seeed Studio, SparkFun, Adafruit, or serial display modules, AV video/OSD modules, and similar options from Taobao or the LCSC open hardware ecosystem in China.