The Apple Watch As An Ammeter

Your shiny new personal electronic device is likely to be designed solely as an app platform to run the products of faceless corporations, so the story goes, and therefore has an ever smaller hacki…

Quantum Sensor Uses Synthetic Diamond

Diamonds are nearly perfect crystals, but not totally perfect. The defects in these crystals give the stones their characteristic colors. But one type of defect, the NV — nitrogen-vacancy &#8…

Building A Digital Compass With An Arduino

The magnetic compass has been a crucial navigational tool for around a thousand years or so, perhaps longer. While classical versions still work perfectly well, you can now get digital magnetometer…

Build A DIY Space Mouse For A More Efficient CAD Workflow

When you find yourself doing a lot of work in 3D modelling, you occasionally wish for something more capable than the humble two-dimensional mouse. A space mouse is a great tool in this regard, and…

Pi Pico Calculates Water Usage

Modern WiFi-enabled microcontrollers have made it affordable and easy to monitor everything from local weather information to electricity usage with typically no more than a few dollars worth of ha…

StarPointer Keeps Scope On Target With Stellarium

On astronomical telescopes of even middling power, a small “finderscope” is often mounted in parallel to the main optics to assist in getting the larger instrument on target. The low ma…

Hall Effect Module Knows Where Your Motor Is

If you have a motor and you’d like to know where the shaft position is, you are likely to turn to an optical encoder scheme. However, as [lingib] points out, you can also use a magnet and a m…

Practical Sensors: The Hall Effect

Measuring a magnetic field can be very easy with some pretty low tech, or it can be very high tech. It just depends on what kind of measurement you need and how much effort you want to expend. The …