Collaborate Disseminate
We think it’s OK to admit that when someone puts a binary display on a project, it’s just a thinly veiled excuse to get more blinkenlights into the world. That …read more Continue reading Baffle the Normies with This Binary Thermometer
For years [Edward] has been building professional grade underwater sensing nodes at prices approachable for an interested individual without a government grant. An important component of these is temperature, and he has been on a quest to get the highest accuracy temperature readings from whatever parts hit that sweet optimum …read more
Continue reading An Epic Tale of Thermistors: Tricks for Much Better Temperature Sensing
If you’re looking for “smart” home appliances, there’s no shortage of options on the market. Even relatively low-end gadgets are jumping on the Internet of Things bandwagon these days (for better or for worse). But what if you’re not looking to purchase a brand new major appliance right now? In …read more
Continue reading Smarten Up Your Air Conditioning with the ESP8266
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
Today’s hacker finds themself in a very interesting moment in time. The availability of powerful microcontrollers and standardized sensor modules is such that assembling the hardware for something like an Internet-connected environmental monitor is about as complex as building with LEGO. Hardware has become elementary in many cases, leaving software as the weak link. It’s easy to build the sensor node to collect the data, but how do you display it in a useful and appealing way?
This simple indoor temperature and humidity sensor put together by [Shyam Ravi] shows one possible solution to the problem using Blynk. In the …read more
Previously, we discussed how to apply the most basic hypothesis test: the z-test. It requires a relatively large sample size, and might be appreciated less by hackers searching for truth on a tight budget of time and money.
As an alternative, we briefly mentioned the t-test. The basic procedure still applies: form hypotheses, sample data, check your assumptions, and perform the test. This time though, we’ll run the test with real data from IoT sensors, and programmatically rather than by hand.
The most important difference between the z-test and the t-test is that the t-test uses a different probability distribution. …read more
Continue reading Statistics and Hacking: A Stout Little Distribution
Having a mold problem in your home is terrible, especially if you have an allergy to it. It can be toxic, aggravate asthma, and damage your possessions. But let’s be honest, before you even get to those listed issues, having mold where you live feels disgusting.
You can clean it with the regular use of unpleasant chemicals like bleach, although only with limited effectiveness. So I was not particularly happy to discover mold growing on the kitchen wall, and decided to do science at it. Happily, I managed to fix my mold problems with a little bit of hacker ingenuity. …read more
Continue reading Hackers vs. Mold: Building a Humidistat Fan
Delicious sheets of wallboard coated with yummy latex paints, all kept warm and moist by a daily deluge of showers and habitually forgetting to turn on the bathroom exhaust fan. You want mildew? Because that’s how you get mildew.
Fed up with the fuzzy little black spots on the ceiling, [Innovative Tom] decided to make bathroom ventilation a bit easier with this humidity-sensing IoT control for his bathroom exhaust fan. Truthfully, his build accomplishes little more than a $15 timer switch for the fan would, with one critical difference — it turns the fan on automatically when the DHT11 sensor …read more
Continue reading Fight Mold and Mildew with an IoT Bathroom Fan