We’re all familiar with the “Black Box” used on commercial aircraft, the flight data recorder which captures the minutia of each and every flight on the off-chance that it’s needed in the event of an accident. But even in less dire circumstances, the complete record of the aircraft’s performance versus what was commanded of it […]
We spend a lot of time in our community discussing the many home computers from the 8-bit era, while almost completely ignoring their industrial equivalents. While today a designer of a machine is more likely than not to reach for a microcontroller, four decades ago they would have used a single-board computer which might have […]
It is a common situation in electronics to have a control loop, that is some sort of feedback that drives the input to a system such as a motor or a heater based upon a sensor to measure something like position or temperature. You’ll have a set point — whatever you want the sensor to […]
[Paul Klinger] can’t seem to get enough of building tiny, amazing gaming rigs, and we love him for that. They combine two of our favorites: miniatures and portable gaming. His newest creation honors the form of the formidable ThinkPad. Of course it has the red nipple and lid LED—wouldn’t be a ThinkPad without ’em. ThinkTiny’s […]
KiCAD has a rightfully earned image problem regarding beginners. The shiny new version 5 has improved things (and we’re very excited for v6!) but the tool is a bit obtuse even when coming from a electronics design background, so we’re always excited to see new learning material. [Mike Watts] is the latest to join the […]
The modern hacker wields a number of tools that operate on the principle of heating things up to extremely high temperatures, so a smoke alarm is really a must-have piece of equipment. But in an era where it seems everything is getting smarter, some might wonder if even our safety gear could benefit from joining […]
If you read Hackaday, it is a good bit you’ve heard of MQTT — Message Queueing Telemetry Transport. If you’ve not used MQTT before, you should check out Ably’s [Kayla Matthews’] post entitled MQTT: A Conceptual Deep Dive paper. She does mention their MQTT protocol connector at the end, and has a few notes about […]
Reading the temperature of your environment is pretty easy right? A quick search suggests the utterly ubiquitous DHT11, which speaks a well documented protocol and has libraries for every conceivable microcontroller and platform. Plug that into your Arduino and boom, temperature (and humidity!) readings. But the simple solution doesn’t hit every need, sometimes things need […]
Measuring equipment such as SPL (Sound Pressure Level) decibel meters may seem daunting, but this article by [Shawon M. Shahryiar] shows that making your own need only have two essential ingredients: a microphone and a microcontroller. Obviously the microphone is for measuring the sound pressure level, and its output is then fed into the ADC […]
For years [Edward] has been building professional grade underwater sensing nodes at prices approachable for an interested individual without a government grant. An important component of these is temperature, and he has been on a quest to get the highest accuracy temperature readings from whatever parts hit that sweet optimum between cost and complexity. First […]