Once upon a time, most things were single-purpose, like the pocket watch. Then somebody made a watch with a date function, and next thing you know, we had TV/VCR combos and Swiss army knives. Now, people pull computers out of their pockets just to check the time or the bed temperature of their RepRap. [Owen]’s […]
Clocks which use words to tell the time in place of numbers are an increasingly popular hacker project, but we have to admit that before seeing this gorgeous clock from [Mitch Feig], we didn’t realize how badly we wanted to see one that could curse like a sailor. But don’t worry, the WordClock-1 knows more […]
Under the right circumstances, Gaussian blurring can make an image seem more clearly defined. [DZL] demonstrates exactly this with a lightweight and compact Gaussian interpolation routine to make the low-resolution thermal sensor data display much better on a small OLED. [DZL] used an MLX90640 sensor to create a DIY thermal imager with a small OLED […]
The ESP32 was introduced a few years ago as an inexpensive way to outfit various microcontrollers with WiFi or Bluetooth. Since then it has been experimented with and developed on, thanks to its similarities to the ESP8266 and the ability to easily program it. Watching the development of this small chip has truly been fascinating […]
Croatian engineers [Slaven Damjanovic] and [Marko Čalić] have developed a wireless system for farmers to monitor plant conditions and weather along their agricultural fields. The system uses an RFM95W module for LoRa communication, and devices are designed to be plug-and-play, battery-powered, and have long-range communication (up to 10km from the gateway). It uses an ATMega328 microprocessor, […]
The persistence of vision (POV) optical illusion is pretty common in cheap toys nowadays, but how cool would it be to have your own programmable POV message board? German electronics grad student [Matej] has luckily created an open source fidget spinner with a fully customizable POV display that lets you share whatever thoughts you’d like […]
Do you own a LightBlue Bean or Bean+ from Punch Through? If you don’t have one now, you probably never will, as the company has recently announced they’re no longer selling or supporting the Bluetooth Low Energy microcontrollers. The company says that after selling more than 100,000 Bean devices, the challenge of keeping up with […]
Writing image data to serially connected (SPI/I2C) displays from a microcontroller is easy enough these days, courtesy of standards defined by the MIPI Alliance, yet there are some gotchas in it which may catch someone using it unaware. [Larry Bank] wrote up a good summary of how one can get maximum performance out of such […]
The Micro:bit is a very neat piece of hardware that, frankly, we don’t see enough of. Which made us all the more interested when [Manoj Nathwani] wrote in to tell us about the gorgeous 3D printed RGB LED lamp he created that uses the BBC-endorsed microcontroller to perform basic gesture detection. Purists will likely point […]