Capacitive touch sensors are entirely in the domain of DIY, requiring little more than a carefully-chosen conductive surface and a microcontroller. This led [John Phillips] to ask why not embed such touch buttons directly into a 3D print? Button locations and labels can be made as part of the 3D print, which is handy. The […]
One of the practical upsides of improved computer vision systems and machine learning has been the ability of computers to translate text from one language or format to another. [Jchen] used this to develop Braille Vision which can turn inaccessible text into braille on the go. Using a headless Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 running […]
As Earthlings, most of us don’t spend a lot of extra time thinking about the gravity on our home planet. Instead, we go about our days only occasionally dropping things or tripping over furniture but largely attending to other matters of more consequence. When humans visit other worlds, though, there’s a lot more consideration of […]
What color do you like your microcontroller boards? Blue? Red? Maybe white or black? Sadly, all of those are about to look old hat. Why? Well, as shared by [JLCPCB], this transparent Arduino looks amazing. The board house produced this marvel using its transparent flexible printed circuit (FPC) material. Basically, the stuff they use for […]
For home HVAC systems, heat pumps seem to be the way of the future. When compared to electric heating they can be three to four times more efficient, and they don’t directly burn fossil fuels. They also have a leg up over standard air conditioning systems since they can provide both cooling and heating, and […]
Taking a picture with a single photoresistor is a brain-breaking idea. But go deeper and imagine taking that same picture with the same photoresistor, but without even facing the object. [Jon Bumstead] did exactly that with compressed sensing and a projector. Incredibly, the resulting image is from the perspective of the projector, not the “camera”. […]
Have you ever finished up a bit of code and thought that typing “git push” in a terminal is just not a satisfying finish? So did [penumbriel], so he built a big red button he could smash instead. This is a very simple hack: an Arduino sits inside a 3D-printed case that holds a big, […]
Recently, [AlphaPhoenix] weighed an airplane. Normally, that wouldn’t be much of an accomplishment. Except in this case, the airplane happened to be in flight at the time. In fact we’re not sure what is more remarkable, as he not only weighed real actual airplanes but a paper airplane too! The sealed box essentially acts as […]
Both small children and cats have a certain tendency to make loud noises at inopportune times, but what if there were a way to combine these auditory effects? This seems to have been the reasoning behind the creation of the Meowsic keyboard, a children’s keyboard that renders notes as cats’ meows. [Steve Gilissen], an appreciator […]
[Tommy] has a great write-up about designing and building a minimalistic handheld electronic game called “Higher Lower”. It’s an audio-driven game in which the unit plays two tones and asks the player to choose whether the second tone was higher in pitch, or lower. The game relies on 3D printed components and minimal electronics, limiting […]