The hack we have for you today is among our most favorite types of hack: a good, honest, simple, and well documented implementation that meets a real need. Our hacker [Solo Pilot] has sent in a link to their basement monitor. The documentation is quite good. It’s terse but comprehensive with links to related information. […]
A terrarium is a little piece of the living world captured in a small enclosure you can pop on your desk or coffee table at home. If you want to keep it as alive as possible, though, you might like to implement some controls. That’s precisely what [yotitote] did with their smart terrarium build. At […]
Plywood is an interesting material: made up of many layers of thin wood plys, it can be built up into elegantly curved shapes. Do you need to limit it to just wood, though? [Zach of All Trades] has proved you do not, when he embedded a light guide, LEDs, microcontrollers and touch sensors into a […]
As the saying goes, modern problems require modern solutions. When the modern problem is that your smart light is being hijacked by the neighbors, [Wjen]’s modern solution is to reverse engineer and replace the mainboard. The light in question is a Phillips Hue Ambiance, and [Wjen]’s excellently-documented six part series takes us through the process […]
The RP2350 has a few advantages over its predecessor, one of which is the ability to load firmware remotely via UART, as [Thomas Pfilser] has documented on his blog and in the video below. [Thomas] had a project that needed more PWM than the RP2350 could provide, and hit upon the idea of using a […]
The Intel 8051 series of 8-bit microcontrollers is long-discontinued by its original manufacturer, but lives on as a core included in all manner of more recent chips. It’s easy to understand and program, so it remains a fixture despite much faster replacements appearing. If you can’t find an original 40-pin DIP don’t worry, because [mit41301] […]
Morse code can be daunting to learn when you’re new to the game, particularly if you need it to pass your desired radio license. However, these days, there are a great many tools to aid in the learning process. A good example is the Morse Master from [Arnov Sharma]. The Morse Master is a translator […]
Recently [Glen Akins] reported on Bluesky that the Zigbee-based sensor he had made for his garden’s rear gate was still going strong after a Summer and Winter on the original 2450 lithium coin cell. The construction plans and design for the unit are detailed in a blog post. At the core is the MS88SF2 SoM […]
A quadrature encoder provides a way to let hardware read movement (and direction) of a shaft, and they can be simple, effective, and inexpensive devices. But [Paulo Marques] observed that when it comes to reading motor speeds with them, what works best at high speeds doesn’t work at low speeds, and vice versa. His solution? […]