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 …

Take A Deep Dive Into A Commodity Automotive Radar Chip

When the automobile industry really began to take off in the 1930s, radar was barely in its infancy, and there was no reason to think something that complicated would ever make its way into the typ…

Clever Mechanism Makes A Linear Control From A Rotary Hall Sensor

Every once in a while we stumble across something so simple yet so clever that we just have to call it out. This custom linear Hall effect sensor is a perfect example of this. By way of backstory, …

Replace Your Automatic Transmission With A Bunch Of Relays

A “Check Engine” light on your dashboard could mean anything from a loose gas cap to a wallet-destroying repair in the offing. For [Dean Segovis], his CEL was indicating a fairly seriou…

Better Air Quality Sensing With CO2

Measuring air quality, as anyone who has tried to tackle this problem can attest, is not as straightforward as it might seem. Even once the nebulous term “quality” is defined, most sens…

Ceiling Fan Adds CO2 Sensor

Ceiling fans seem to be an oft-misunderstood or overlooked household appliance. As such, they seem to have missed a lot of the IoT wave. Sure, you can get smart controllers for them to plug into yo…

Trombone Controls Virtual Trombone

Guitar Hero was a cultural phenomenon a little over a decade ago, and showed that there was a real fun time to be had playing a virtual instrument on a controller. There are several other similar g…

A Simple Web Configured BLE To GPIO Bridge

[Daniel Dakhno] kept ending up in a situation where the ability to read the status of, or control a few digital IO pins with minimal effort, would be terribly useful. Not wanting to keep compiling …

2022 Hackaday Prize: Plant Monitoring System Grows To Include LoRa

Change on industrial scales is slow, but if you’re operating your own small farm or simply working in a home garden there are some excellent ways to use water more effectively. The latest too…

Presence-Detecting Cushion Keeps You From Sitting Your Life Away

They say that sitting is the new smoking. They’re wrong — smoking is much, much worse, for you than sitting, and smoking only while standing or while jogging around the block in no way …