Arduino Gear Shift Indicator Finds ‘Em So You Won’t Grind ‘Em

Now, it’s been a shamefully long time since we’ve driven a car with a manual transmission, but as we recall it was pretty straightforward. It certainly didn’t require a lot …read more Continue reading Arduino Gear Shift Indicator Finds ‘Em So You Won’t Grind ‘Em

Old Gas Meter gets Smart with the ESP8266

Measuring the usage of domestic utilities such as water, gas or electricity usually boils down to measuring a repetitive pulse signal with respect to time. To make things easy, most modern utility meters have a pulsed LED output, which can …read more

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Litar: An Air Guitar Using LiDAR

This year, [Blecky’s] Hackaday Prize Entry is an air guitar which uses multiple LiDAR sensors to create the virtual strings. What’s also neat is that he’s using his own LiDAR sensor, the MappyDot Plus, an enhanced version of his 2017 Prize Entry, the MappyDot.

He uses a very clever arrangement of six sensors to get four virtual strings. Each sensor scans a 25-degree field of view. Three adjacent sensors are used to define a string, with the string being in the overlap of the outer two of those sensors. The middle sensor is used for the distance data.

For the …read more

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Electromagnet-Powered Pendulum

We’re always happy to see hackers inspired to try something different by what they see on Hackaday. To [SimpleTronic] has a project that will let you stretch your analog electronics skills in a really fun way. It’s an electromagnet pendulum analog circuit. Whether you’re building it, or just studying the schematics, this is a fun way to brush up on the non-digital side of the craft.

The pendulum is a neodymium magnet on the head of a bolt, dangling on a one foot aluminium chain. Below, a Hall Effect sensor rests atop an electromagnet — 1″ in diameter, with 6/8″ …read more

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A Very Accurate Current Probe

There’s many different ways of measuring current. If it’s DC, the easiest way is to use a shunt resistor and measure the voltage across it, and for AC you could use a current transformer. But the advent of the Hall-effect sensor has provided us a much better way of measuring currents. Hall sensors offers several advantages over shunts and CT’s – accuracy, linearity, low temperature drift, wider frequency bandwidth, and low insertion loss (burden) being some of them. On the flip side, they usually require a (dual) power supply, an amplification circuit, and the ability to be “zero adjusted” to …read more

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