Custom Dog Door Prevents Culinary Atrocities

Riley, an 8 lb pug, has more beauty than brains, and a palate as unrefined as crude oil. While we hate criticizing others’ interests and tastes, his penchant for eating cat poop needed to sto…

The Future Looks Bleak For Alexa Skill Development

While the average Hackaday reader is arguably less likely than most to install a megacorp’s listening device in their home, we know there’s at least some of you out there that have an A…

Garage Door Automation With No Extra Hardware

Home automation projects have been popular as long as microcontrollers have been available to the general public. Building computers to handle minutiae so we don’t have to is one of life&#821…

Baseboard Heaters Get Automated

If you’re lucky enough to have central heating and/or air conditioning, with an automatic thermostat, you probably don’t have to worry too much about the outside temperature. But centra…

The Easy Way To Make A Smart Appliance

It seems that finding an appliance without some WiFi connectivity and an app to load your laundry data into the cloud is an increasingly difficult thing to do in the 2020s. Many of us resolutely re…

A Giga-Sunset For Gigaset IoT Devices

In today’s “predictable things that happened before and definitely will happen again”, we have another company in the “smart device” business that has just shuttered their servers…

Retrogadgets: Butler In A Box

You walk into your house and issue a voice command to bring up the lights and start a cup of coffee. No big deal, right? Siri, Google, and Alexa can do all that. Did we mention it is 1985? And, app…

Automation Makes Traditional Japanese Wood Finishing Easier

Unless you move in architectural circles, you might never have heard of Yakisugi. But as a fence builder, [Lucas] over at Cranktown City sure has, with high-end clients requesting the traditional J…

2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: SMS Controlled Heating

Hackaday.io user [mabe42] works during the week away from their home city and rents a small apartment locally to make this life practical. However, the heating system, a night-storage system, is no…

Building A Tiny Organic Swimming Pool With Natural Filtering

When we think of swimming pools, we typically think of large fiberglass, plastic, or concrete constructions full of pristine, clear water. They’re usually maintained in this state with the re…

Your Voice Assistant Doesn’t Have To Be Cloudy

Voice assistants are neat — they let us interface with computers without having to bother with touching them at all. Still, many decry the perceived privacy intrusion these devices present, a…

2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: A DIY SCADA Smart Home

Supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, systems sit in the background in industrial settings, performing all kinds of important jobs but in an ad-hoc setup, depending on the precise req…

2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: Simple Window Closer Relies On Gravity

While most pet owners are happy to help out their furry friends, everyone has a limit. For [Gauthier], getting up to open or close the window every three minutes so their cat can go out on the balc…

Simple Optical Meter Sets New Standards For Documentation

PiggyMeter is a wonderful example of a device that you never knew you needed – simple, elegant, easy to build, and accompanied by amazing documentation. It’s a snap-on interface for ele…

Piano Feeder Gets Pets Playing For Their Supper

If you ever watched a video of Piano Cat and wondered if your cat could learn to play, then [Sebastian Sokołowski] has a possible solution with this combination piano tutor and cat feeder. Starting…

Making Wooden Shingles With Hand Tools

While they have mostly been replaced with other roofing technologies, wooden shingles have a certain rustic charm. If you’re curious about how to make them by hand, [Harry Rogers] takes us th…

Building A Semi-Auto Cookie Dough Gun

Are you a chocolate chip cookie connoisseur? Do you want to eat more cookies than you probably should at the push of a button? Don’t worry, [Startup Chuck] has got you covered with his semi-a…

Another Chance To Revive Your Nabaztag

The early history of home internet appliances was replete with wonderful curios as a new industry sought to both find a function for itself and deliver something useful with whatever semiconductors…

Alarm Panel Hack Defeats Encryption By Ignoring It

As frustrating as it may be for a company to lock you into its ecosystem by encrypting their protocols, you have to admit that it presents an enticing challenge. Cracking encryption can be more tro…

You Wouldn’t Download A House

Shelter is one of the most basic of human needs, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we continually come up with new ways to build homes. Most building systems are open source to an extent, an…