Collaborate Disseminate
A common complaint about open hardware and software is that the aesthetic aspects of the projects often leave something to be desired. This isn’t wholly surprising, as the type of hackers who are building these things tend to be more concerned with how well they work than what they look …read more
Continue reading HestiaPi: a Stylish Open Hardware Thermostat
Imagine that you’re starting a project where you need to measure temperature and humidity. That sounds easy in the abstract, but choosing a real device out of many involves digging into seemingly infinite details and trade-offs that come with them. If it’s a low-stakes monitoring project, picking the first sensor …read more
Continue reading Picking the Right Sensors for Home Automation
It started as a joke, as sometimes these things do. [Marek Więcek] thought building a personal radiation detector would not only give him something to work on, but it would be like having a gadget out of the Fallout games. He would check the data from time to time and have a bit of a laugh. But then things got real. When he started seeing rumors on social media that a nearby nuclear reactor had suffered some kind of radiation leak, his “joke” radiation detector suddenly became serious business.
With the realization that having his own source of detailed environmental …read more
To those of us in the corporate world, the conference room is where hope goes to die. Crammed into a space too small for the number of invitees, the room soon glows with radiated body heat and the aromas of humans as the time from their last shower gradually increases. To say it’s not a recipe for productivity is an understatement at best.
Having suffered through too many of these soporific situations, [Charles Ouweland] took matters into his own hands and built this portable air quality meter for meetings. With an OLED display on top and sensors inside, it displays …read more
Continue reading Monitoring Air Quality, One Sleepy Meeting At A Time
If you want to measure humidity (and temperature, and maybe even barometric pressure) in a device that you’re building, have a look at this comprehensive test of seven different options. We’re going to summarize the results here, but you’ll really want to read up on the testing methodology — it’s great science hacking. Did you know about using saturated salt solutions to produce constant humidity levels for calibration? We didn’t.
The so-called DHT22 module doesn’t fare all that well, with one of six that [Robert] tested being basically horrible, and three of them breaking within two years of use. The …read more
