Category: home hacks

The e-paper “dashboard” is something we’ve seen plenty of times here at Hackaday. Use it to show your daily schedule, the news, weather, maybe the latest posts from your favorite hardware hacking website. Any information source that doesn’t need to be updated more than every hour or so is a perfect candidate. All you’ve got […]
For getting around on most surfaces, it’s hard to beat the utility of the wheel. Versatile, inexpensive, and able to be made from a wide array of materials has led to this being a cornerstone technology for the past ten thousand years or so. But with that much history it can seem a little bit […]
The bulbs inside scanners (before transitioning to LED, anyway) were cold cathode fluorescent tubes that emit a fairly wide bandwidth of light. They were purpose-built to produce a very specific type and shape of light, but [Julius Curt] has taken this in a new, upcycled direction. Instead of just producing light, the light itself is […]
[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 […]