Collaborate Disseminate
[Giovanni Aggiustatutto] creates a DIY weather station to measure rain fall, wind direction, humidity and temperature. [Giovanni] has been working on various parts of the weather station, including the rain …read more Continue reading A Weather Station For Whether It Rains or Shines
[Justin Lam] created a wonderfully-detailed writeup of his Smart Sourdough Lid project, which was created out of a desire to get better data on the progress and health of his sourdough starters, and to do so more efficiently. The result …read more
Continue reading Smart Lid Spies On Sourdough Starter, Sends Data Wirelessly
It’s always good to see old hardware saved from the junk pile, especially when the end result is as impressive as this analog gauge weather display put together by [Build Comics]. It ended up being a truly multidisciplinary project, combing not only restoration work and modern microcontroller trickery, but a …read more
Continue reading Vintage Gauges Turned Classy Weather Display
Deep freezers are a great thing to have, especially when the world gets apocalyptic. Of course, freezers are only good when they’re operating properly. And since they’re usually chillin’ out of sight and full of precious goods, keeping an eye on them is important.
When [Adam] started looking at commercial …read more
Continue reading This Freezer Failure Alarm Keeps Your Spoils Unspoiled
Readers who survived the 1970s will no doubt remember the “mood ring” fad, where a liquid crystal mounted to a ring would magically reveal your current emotional state to all and sundry by changing color. This nifty thermochromic display is based on the same principle, and while it might not …read more
Continue reading Thermochromic Display Tells You the Temperature Despite Your Current Mood
Want to build something using VFD tubes, but don’t need yet another clock project? In that case, this wall mounted temperature and humidity display created by [commanderkull] might be exactly what you’re looking for. With six IV-11 tubes, this display is a practical way to add some of that gorgeous …read more
Sometimes a hack isn’t about building something cool. Sometimes it’s more tactical, where the right stuff is cobbled together to gather the information needed to make decisions, or just to document some interesting phenomenon.
Take this impromptu but thorough exploration of basement humidity undertaken by [Matthias Wandel]. Like most people …read more
Continue reading Exploring Basement Humidity With A Raspberry Pi
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
There are plenty of great reasons to have a child. Perhaps you find the idea of being harshly criticized by a tiny person very appealing, or maybe you enjoy somebody screaming nonsense at you while you’re trying to work on something. But for us, we think the best reason for procreation is getting another excuse to build stuff. It’ll be what, at least two years before a baby can solder or program a microcontroller? Somebody’s going to have to do it for them until then.
To try to help his baby daughter get on a better sleep schedule, [Amir Avni] …read more
The Synchroscope is an interesting power plant instrument which doubles up as two devices in one. If the generator frequency is not matched with the grid frequency, the rotation direction of the synchroscope pointer indicates if the frequency (generator speed) needs to be increased or decreased. When it stops rotating, the pointer angle indicates the phase difference between the generator and the grid. When [Chris Muncy] got his hands on an old synchroscope which had seen better days at a nuclear power plant control room, he decided to use it as the enclosure for a long-pending plan to build a …read more