Category: home hacks

[Mellow_Labs] wanted an Everything Presence Lite kite but found it was always out of stock. Therefore, he decided to create his own. The kit uses a millimeter wave sensor as a super-sensitive motion tracker for up to three people. It can even read your heart rate remotely. You can see a video of the project […]
Organizing things in your home or workshop is a constant battle for some of us. Until we have access to a Tardis or bag of holding, maybe the next best thing is a sliding shelf system. [HAXMAN] found a great set of sliding shelves online, but after recovering from sticker shock decided he could build […]
Sometimes off-the-shelf solutions to a problem don’t meet your expectations. That’s what led [TomGoff] to build his own solar pond fountain. This build features a lot of creative reuse of materials [TomGoff] already had on hand, like the end of a cable reel for the platform and a wheelbarrow inner tube for flotation. A 3D […]
[Jeff Sandberg] has put a fair bit of effort into adding solar and battery storage with associated smarts to his home, but his energy usage statistics were incomplete. His solution was to read data from the utility meter using RTL-SDR to fill in the blanks. The results are good so far, and there’s no reason […]
[mcu_nerd] is like any engineer, which is why his problem of an occasionally leaky water heater sure looks like a research project with no end in sight. Sure there’s probably a commercial product out there that can be had for half the cost and a few clicks of the mouse, but what’s the point in […]
At first sight, [Kyle]’s Elroy lamp is simply an attractive piece of modern-styled interior furnishing; its clean lines, wood grain, and contemporary patterning being an asset to the room. But when he pulls out his phone, things change. Because this lamp hides a secret: at its heart may be a standard LED bulb, but the […]
Back at the 2017 Superconference, Hackaday Managing Editor Elliot Williams started his talk about the so-called “Internet of Things” by explaining the only part he doesn’t like about the idea is the Internet… and the things. It’s a statement that most of us would still agree with today. If anything, the situation has gotten worse […]
It’s one of the rituals of our age, rebooting the family router when the bandwidth falters. Flip the power, and after half a minute or so your YouTube video starts up again. Consumer-grade router hardware is not the most reliable computing equipment you will own, as [Nick Sayer] found out when the router at his […]
Mozilla recently officially released their IoT platform. This framework comes with “Gateway” software that can run on a Raspberry Pi and a framework that can run on any number of devices. As we’ve seen, IoT is a dubious prospect for consumers. When you throw in all the privacy issues, support issues, and end-of-life issues; it […]
You’ve probably noticed that modern life has become rather complicated, and the projects we cover here on Hackaday have not been immune to the march of progress. We certainly aren’t complaining, but we’ll admit to the occasional wistful daydream of returning to the days when the front page of Hackaday looked more MacGyver than Microsoft. […]