Category Archives: lifehacks

Former Smoker Now Pats Pockets for Motivation

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It’s hard to quit smoking. Trust us, we know. Half the battle is wanting to quit in the first place. Once you do, the other half is mostly fighting with yourself until enough time goes by that food tastes better, and life looks longer.

[Danko] recently quit smoking. And because idle hands are Big Tobacco’s tools, he kept himself busy through those torturous first few days by building a piece of pocket-sized motivation. This little board’s main purpose is to help him root for himself by showing the time elapsed since his final cigarette, the number of cigarettes he has …read more

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Business On The Outside, Electronics Workstation On The Inside

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As an electrical engineering student, [Brandon Rice] had the full suite of electronics tools you’d expect. Cramming them all into a dorm room was doable — but cramped — a labour to square everything away from his desk’s top when he had to work on something else. To make it easier on himself, he built himself a portable electronics workstation inside the dimensions of a briefcase.

Built from scratch, the workstation includes a list of features that should have you salivating by the end. Instead of messing with a bunch of cables, on-board power is supplied by a dismantled 24V, …read more

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Ground-Effect Lighting For Your Bed.

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If you’ve ever disturbed your partner by getting up during the night and flicking on the bathroom light — or tripping over something and startling them awake completely in the ensuing catastrophe — [Kristjan Berce]’s idea to install motion-activated ground-effect lighting on his girlfriend’s bed might hold your attention.

[Berce] is using an Arduino Nano for the project’s brain, a PIR sensor from Adafruit, and an L7805 voltage regulator to handle load spikes.  He doesn’t specify the type of LED strip he’s using, but Neopixels might be a safe bet here. Soldering issues over with, he …read more

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Interactive Plant Lamps for Quiet Spaces

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If you’ve spent any serious time in libraries, you’ve probably noticed that they attract people who want or need to be alone without being isolated. In this space, a kind of silent community is formed. This phenomenon was the inspiration [MoonAnchor23] needed to build a network of connected house plants for a course on physical interaction and realization. But you won’t find these plants unleashing their dry wit on twitter. They only talk to each other and to nearby humans.

No living plants were harmed during this project—the leaves likely wouldn’t let much light through, anyway. The plants are each …read more

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IoT Potty Training

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If you have not had children, stop reading now, we implore you. Because before you’ve had kids, you can’t know how supremely important it is that they take care of going to the bathroom by themselves. [David Gouldin] knows how it is. But unlike most of us, he resorted to using an Amazon IoT button and Twilio. No, we are not kidding.

The problem he was trying to solve is when his younger child would need to use the potty in the middle of the night, calling out for assistance would wake the older child. [David] said it best himself: …read more

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What is Twitter Without the Numbers?

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How many people liked your last tweet? Oh yeah? Didja get any retweets? Was it enough to satisfy your need for acceptance, or were you disappointed by the Twitterverse’s reaction?

If you couldn’t see the number of likes, retweets, or followers you had, would you still even use Twitter?

[Ben Grosser] wants to know. He’s trying to see if people will look their relationship with social media squarely in the eye and think honestly about how it affects them. After all, social media itself isn’t the bad guy here—we are all responsible for our own actions and reactions. He’s created …read more

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DIY Text-to-Speech with Raspberry Pi

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We can almost count on our eyesight to fail with age, maybe even past the point of correction. It’s a pretty big flaw if you ask us. So, how can a person with aging eyes hope to continue reading the printed word?

There are plenty of commercial document readers available that convert text to speech, but they’re expensive. Most require a smart phone and/or an internet connection. That might not be as big of an issue for future generations of failing eyes, but we’re not there yet. In the meantime, we have small, cheap computers and plenty of open source …read more

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Definitive Dog Feeding with Arduino

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Some dogs have no sense of self-preservation. Given the opportunity, they will eat until they’re sick. It’s up to us humans to both feed them and remember doing it so they aren’t accidentally overfed. In a busy household with young children, the tricky part is the remembering.

[Bryan]’s family feeds their dog Chloe once a day, in the mornings. She was a rescue who spent a few years scrounging for meals on the street, so some part of her is always interested in finding food, even if she just ate. Each morning, the flurry of activity throughout the house is …read more

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Always Misplacing Your Keys? You Can Fix That With Some Logic Chips

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Every time he came home, it was the same thing. As soon as he crossed the threshold, his keys just disappeared. There was no other logical explanation for it. And whenever it was time to leave again, he had to turn the house upside down to find them.

One day, [out-of-the-box] decided he’d had enough and built a door-activated alarm system out of stuff he had on hand—a decade counter, a cheapo reed switch-based door alarm, and some transistors. When the door is closed, the decade counter’s output is set to light up a green LED. When he comes home …read more

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Finding Your Motorbike Using Wi-Fi

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An urban planner once told me that every car requires at least four times as much space as they actually occupy. Each needs a spot on the roads, and three available parking spaces: one at home, one at work, and one to shop. Motorcycles are much smaller, but they still spend most of their time parked.

Motorcycles are the primary means of transport in Southeast Asia, and learning to safely drive one is an essential part of adapting to life here. Assuming it’s not pouring rain and you’re not flooded past your ankles, it’s actually quite a pleasant experience… until …read more

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