A Lightweight Balloon Tracker For High Altitude Missions

It’s pretty easy to take a balloon, fill it up with helium, and send it up in to the upper atmosphere. It’s much harder to keep track of it and recover it when it falls back to Earth. I…

Why Use A Sensor When A Pseudo-Sensor Will Do?

Usually, when you need to sense something in a project, the answers are straightforward. Want to sense air temperature? There’s a sensor for that. Particulate content in the air? There’…

Marimbatron: A Digital Marimba Prototyping Project

The Marimbatron is [Leo Kuipers] ‘s final project as part of the MIT “Fabacademy program” supervised by [Prof. Neil Gershenfeld] of the Center for Bits and Atoms. The course aims …

Bed Sensors Do More Than You’d Think

Bed sensors do sort of sound like a gimmick — after all, who cares whether someone is occupying the bed? But if you think about it, that information is quite useful from a home automation sta…

D-POINT: A Digital Pen With Optical-Inertial Tracking

[Jcparkyn] clearly had an interesting topic for their thesis project, and was conscientious enough to write up a chunk of it and release it to the wild. The project in question is a digital pen tha…

Blood Pressure Cuff Hacked Into Water Level Sensor

We often write a post and then learn something new and cool from the comments. The same thing happened when [Andreas] posted a video about monitoring fluid levels. Commenters told him that the best…

Arduino Variometer In A Mint Tin

While humans have done a pretty good job of figuring out how to fly with various mechanical contrivances, the fact remains that our natural senses aren’t really well suited to being off the g…