Custom Firmware For Even Cheaper Bluetooth Thermometers

Readers may recall when we first covered the $5 Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC temperature and humidity sensor back in 2020. Prolific hacker [Aaron Christophel] wrote a custom firmware for the affordable gadget…

Building A Diet Coke Button

[mars91] had an interesting problem to solve—his girlfriend often requested Diet Coke, but yelling for one across the apartment was frustrating and impractical. A dedicated Diet Coke button seemed …

Measuring A Well With Just A Hammer And A Smartphone

What’s the best way to measure the depth of a well using a smartphone? If you’re fed up with social media, you might kill two birds with one stone and drop the thing down the well and l…

Learning About The Flume Water Monitor

The itch to investigate lurks within all us hackers. Sometimes, you just have to pull something apart to learn how it works. [Stephen Crosby] found himself doing just that when he got his hands on …

ESP8266 Keeps Tabs On Wood Stove Temperature

Wood heat offers unique advantages compared to more modern heating systems, especially in remote areas. But it also comes with its own challenges, namely, keeping the fire going at the optimum temp…

A Look Inside IKEA’s Vallhorn Motion Sensor Teardown

A good source of hackable home automation parts has come for a while in the form of inexpensive modules offered by large retailers such as Lidl, or IKEA. They’re readily available and easy to…

Exercise Wheel Tracker Confirms Suspicions About Cats

What do cats get up to in the 30 minutes or so a day that they’re awake? Being jerks, at least in our experience. But like many hackers, [Brent] wanted to quantify the activity of his cat, an…

The Automatic Battery Charger You Never Knew You Needed

When we saw [Max.K]’s automatic NiMh battery charger float past in the Hackaday tips line, it brought to mind a charger that might be automatic in the sense that any modern microcontroller ba…

Making A Stool From Clay

We’ve seen furniture made out of all sorts of interesting materials here, but clay certainly isn’t the first one that comes to mind. [Mia Mueller] is expanding our horizons with this cl…

Massive Mural From Thermal Receipt Paper

Turning trash into art is something we undoubtedly all admire. [Davis DeWitt] did just that with a massive mural made entirely from discarded receipt paper. [Davis] got lucky while doing some light…

Recreating Unobtainium Weather Station Sensors

Imagine you own a weather station. Then imagine that after some years have passed, you’ve had to replace one of the sensors multiple times. Your new problem is that the sensor is no longer av…

The Barcode Beast Likes Your CDs

Over the years we’ve featured many projects which attempt to replicate the feel of physical media when playing music. Usually this involves some kind of token representation of the media, but…

Smart Thermostats Pitched For Texas Homes To Relieve Stressed Grid

It’s not much of a secret that Texas’ nearly completely isolated grid is in a bit of a pickle, with generating capacity often being handily outstripped during periods of extreme demand.…

Landscape Motif Makes This E-Ink Weather Display Easy To Understand

True weather geeks will disagree, but there might be a better way to know how to dress for the day than divining what the weather will likely be from the current readings for temperature, pressure,…

Cheap Sensor Changes Personality

If you want to add humidity and temperature sensors to your home automation sensor, you can — like [Maker’s Fun Duck] did — buy some generic ones for about a buck. For a dollar, y…

Clever Circuit Makes Exercise Slightly Less Boring

We say this with the greatest respect, but [Joel] — your exercise routine is horrible! Kudos for getting up and doing something, but 108 trips up and down the stairs? That sounds like torture…

A CO2 Traffic Light On An SAO

[David Bryant] clearly has an awareness of the impact of an excess concentration of CO2 in the local environment and has designed an SAO board to add a CO2 traffic light indicator to one of the spa…

Interfacing Old Burglar Alarm Sensors Into HomeAssistant

The annoying thing about commercial smart home gear is its lack of interoperability. HomeAssistant is very flexible though, and it’s easy to use all kinds of gear—even stuff you bodge togethe…

DIY 3D Hand Controller Using A Webcam And Scripting

Are you ready to elevate your interactive possibilities without breaking the bank? If so, explore [Caio Bassetti]’s tutorial on creating a full 3D hand controller using only a webcam, MediaPipe Han…

Phoniebox: A Family-Friendly Simple Music Box

Ever hear of the Phoniebox project? If not – tune in, that’s a hacker’s project your entire family will appreciate. Phoniebox is a software suite and tutorial for building a jukeb…