This Air Particulate Sensor Can Also Check Your Pulse Rate

The MAX30105 is an optical sensor capable of a great many things. It can sense particulate matter in the air, or pick up the blinking of an eye. Or, you can use it as a rudimentary way to measure y…

Exotische Materialien: Unverhoffte Blumen

Ein Gittermaterial imitiert auf unerwartete Weise die Natur

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…

Converting Bluetooth Sensors To Zigbee

With the increase in popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and their need to communicate wirelessly,  there’s been a corresponding explosion of wireless protocols to chose from. Of c…

Capacitive Rainmeter Measures The Sky Water Just Fine

If you’ve got a smart home, or you just want to know how soaked your garden is getting in the winter, you might want to measure rainfall. There are a bunch of ways to go about it, and this ca…

Simple CMOS Circuit Allows Power And Data Over Twisted-Pair Wiring

If you need to send data from sensors, there are plenty of options, including a bewildering selection of wireless methods. Trouble is, most of those protocols require a substantial stack of technol…

3D Printing Improves Passive Pixel Water Gauge

Here at Hackaday, we feature all kinds of projects, and we love them all the same. But some projects are a little easier to love than others, especially those that get the job done in as simple a w…

DIY Repair Brings An X-Ray Microscope Back Into Focus

Aside from idle curiosity, very few of us need to see inside chips and components to diagnose a circuit. But reverse engineering is another story; being able to see what lies beneath the inscrutabl…

Hackaday Links: September 10, 2023

Most of us probably have a vision of how “The Robots” will eventually rise up and deal humanity out of the game. We’ve all seen that movie, of course, and know exactly what will h…

Clock Runs Computer In Slow-Motion

At the heart of all computers is a clock, a dedicated timepiece ensuring that all of the parts of the computer are synchronized and can work together to execute the instructions that the computer r…

Feeling The Heat: Railway Defect Detection

On the technology spectrum, railroads would certainly seem to skew toward the brutally simplistic side of things. A couple of strips of steel, some wooden ties and gravel ballast to keep everything…

Smart Occupancy Sensor Knows All

In the last few decades, building engineers and architects have made tremendous strides in improving the efficiency of various buildings and the devices that keep them safe and comfortable to live …

Remote Water Quality Monitoring

While it can be straightforward to distill water to high purity, this is rarely the best method for producing water for useful purposes. Even drinking water typically needs certain minerals in it, …

Low-Power Wi-Fi Includes E-Paper Display

Designing devices that can operate in remote environments on battery power is often challenging, especially if the devices need to last a long time between charges or battery swaps. Thankfully ther…

Wi-Fi Sensor For Rapid Prototyping

There might seem like a wide gulf between the rapid prototyping of a project and learning a completely new electronics platform, but with the right set of tools, these two tasks can go hand-in-hand…

Not A Pot, Not An Encoder: Exploring Synchros For Rotational Sensing

We’re all familiar with getting feedback from a rotating shaft, for which we usually employ a potentiometer or encoder. But there’s another device that, while less well-known, has some …

Exploring The Hall Effect For Haptic Feedback PS4 Joysticks

Modern gaming console controllers aren’t without their annoyances — Joy-Con drift, anyone? The problems might stem from design deficiencies, but we suspect that user enthusiasm and the …