Author Archives: Rich Hawkes

Enter the Space Tunnel

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What’s better than 1 string of LED lights? 96. That’s how many. Each string of the 96 has 60 ws2812b LEDs, for a total of 5760 individually addressable RGB LEDs.  That’s not the cool part of [jaymeekae]’s Space Tunnel installation, the cool part is that they’re interactive.

Starting out with some PVC piping, dark cloth was used as a backdrop and the LED strips were attached to it. Several power supplies are used to supply the voltage necessary and each strip controlled by FadeCandy chips which connect to, in this case, a Windows PC via USB. Initially, computer power supplies …read more

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Forgot About Valentine’s Day? A Quick IoT Valentine

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Did you forget about Valentine’s Day? Do you need a quick project to get ready for Valentine’s Day? [Becky Stern] has you covered. She’s whipped up a neat Internet-enabled Valentine project which should be pretty quick to put together.

At its heart (pun intended) is an ESP8266 microcontroller, in this case an Adafruit Feather Huzzah. Several layers of tissue paper heart are stitched together and cut out into a heart shape and then attached to a spring. A vibrating pager motor is used to shake the it when a signal comes in. Two buttons are used to send the message …read more

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Forgot About Valentine’s Day? A Quick IoT Valentine

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Did you forget about Valentine’s Day? Do you need a quick project to get ready for Valentine’s Day? [Becky Stern] has you covered. She’s whipped up a neat Internet-enabled Valentine project which should be pretty quick to put together.

At its heart (pun intended) is an ESP8266 microcontroller, in this case an Adafruit Feather Huzzah. Several layers of tissue paper heart are stitched together and cut out into a heart shape and then attached to a spring. A vibrating pager motor is used to shake the it when a signal comes in. Two buttons are used to send the message …read more

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Wood and Rubber Band Pinball

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As pinball has evolved, it has gone from a simple gravity based game to an electromechanical one.  As the 20th century came to a close, pinball games added digital elements as well, matrix displays replaced electromechanical scoreboards, and LEDs replaced incandescent bulbs. While the game got more creative as new technologies became available, the basics of the pinball never changed – keep the ball alive using your skill with the flippers (and the occasional nudge.) [Garagem Fab Lab] has taken the basics of the pinball machine and, with some wood and elastic bands, has created a very nice desktop pinball …read more

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Build Your Own P-Brain

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I don’t think we’ll call virtual assistants done until we can say, “Make me a sandwich” (without adding “sudo”) and have a sandwich made and delivered to us while sitting in front of our televisions. However, they are not completely without use as they are currently – they can let you know the time, weather and traffic, schedule or remind you of meetings and they can also be used to order things from Amazon. [Pat AI] was interested in building an open source, extensible, virtual assistant, so he built P-Brain.

Think of P-Brain as the base for a more complex …read more

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Taking Control Of Your Furby

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Furbys have been around for a while and they are an interesting (if annoying) toy that will teach the kids to be okay with their eventual robotic overlords. In the meantime, the latest version of the robotic companion/toy/annoyance uses Bluetooth LE to communicate with the owner and [Jeija] has been listening in on the Bluetooth communication, trying to reverse engineer the protocol in order to run code on Furby.

[Jeija] has made a lot of progress and can already control the Furby’s actions, antenna and backlight color, and change the Furby’s emotional state by changing the values of the Furby’s …read more

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Innocent TV Imprisoned Behind Mirror

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After following along with all the Magic Mirror builds, [Troy Denton] finally caved in and started building one for his girlfriend for Christmas. These popular builds are all pretty much bespoke, and this one is no different.

His victim TV didn’t have the ability to be switched on and off by the Raspberry Pi using HDMI/CEC, so he came up with an alternative. He got a couple of opto-isolators and soldered one to the on/off button on the TV’s control board. The Pi didn’t know whether it was switching the TV on or off, it just knew it was switching …read more

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Open Sound Control of Kitchen Lights

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Controlling the Internet of Things is all about passing information around. Realistically, it doesn’t matter what is used, be it MQTT, HTTP, serial data, whatever, and it doesn’t really matter what data is sent as long as the sender and receiver agree on what the data means. MIDI could be used to pass information back and forth, for example and while MIDI is good for some things, Open Sound Control is a more modern alternative and one area where OSC excels over MIDI is Internet connectivity. [Matt] used OSC to control the lighting he installed in his kitchen.

[Matt] had …read more

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Open Sound Control of Kitchen Lights

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Controlling the Internet of Things is all about passing information around. Realistically, it doesn’t matter what is used, be it MQTT, HTTP, serial data, whatever, and it doesn’t really matter what data is sent as long as the sender and receiver agree on what the data means. MIDI could be used to pass information back and forth, for example and while MIDI is good for some things, Open Sound Control is a more modern alternative and one area where OSC excels over MIDI is Internet connectivity. [Matt] used OSC to control the lighting he installed in his kitchen.

[Matt] had …read more

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Adding an IKEA Wireless Charger to a Project

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IKEA sometimes seems like a DIY store disguised as a furniture store. We may go there looking for a new sofa or kitchen table, but, to the DIY enthusiast, it’s a shop full of possibilities. While wandering through the local IKEA, [Erich Styger] noticed they had some Qi wireless chargers and receivers for a very reasonable price, so he bought a few and added wireless charging to his Mikroelektronika Hexiwear.

[Erich Styger] didn’t like the clumsiness of the Hexiwear’s USB charging options and, at the price he got the IKEA Vitahult Qi phone case wireless receivers at, he couldn’t resist …read more

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