Collaborate Disseminate
We have all been stuck inside for too long, and maybe that’s why we have recently seen a number of projects attempting to help humans take better care of their housemates from Kingdom Plantae. To survive, plants need nutrients, light, …read more
Continue reading Give Your Smart Home a Green Thumb with MQTT
Soil moisture sensors are cheap and easy to interface with, to the point that combining one with an Arduino and blinking an LED when your potted plant is feeling a bit parched is a common beginners project. But what about …read more
Continue reading ESP32 Soil Monitors Tap Into Ultra-Low Power Mode
As a general rule, it’s not nice to prank your mother. Moms have a way of exacting subtle revenge, generally in the form of guilt. That’s not to say it might not be worth the effort, especially when the prank is actually wrapped in a nice gesture, like this ever-changing …read more
Continue reading Color E-Ink Display Photo Frame Pranks [Mom]
For those of us old enough to experience it first hand, the original Game Boy was pretty incredible, but did have one major downside: battery consumption. In the 90s rechargeable batteries weren’t common, which led to most of us playing our handhelds beside power outlets. Some modern takes on the …read more
That was a close shave! On Tuesday, asteroid 2011 ES4 passed really close to the earth. JPL’s close approach data pegs its nominal distance from earth at about 0.00081083276352288 au! Yeah, we had to look it up too: that’s around 75,000 miles (120,000 kilometers), just ten times the diameter of …read more
A typical bicycle computer from the store rack will show your speed, trip distance, odometer, and maybe the time. We can derive all this data from a magnet sensor and a clock, but we live in a world with all kinds of sensors at our disposal. [Matias N.] has the …read more
Continue reading Bike Computer Powers on Long After Your Legs Give Out
There’s no shortage of things to like about the ESP8266 and ESP32, but if we had to make a list of the best features these WiFi-enabled microcontrollers have to offer, their power management capabilities would certainly be near the top. Which is how we assumed [Mark] was able to take …read more
Continue reading ESP32 Trail Camera Goes the Distance on AA Batteries
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams navigate the crowded streets of the hackersphere for the most interesting hardware projects seen in the past week. Forget flip-dot displays, you need to build yourself a sequin display that uses a robot finger and sequin-covered fabric to send a message. You can …read more
If you’ve ever tried to make a really low-power circuit — especially one that runs on harvested power — you have probably fallen into at least a few of the many traps that await the unwary in this particular realm of electronic design. Well, Dave Young has been there, seen …read more
Continue reading The Cult of Really Low-Power Circuits: Scrounging, Sipping, and Seeing Power
There are times when a sensor is required that does its job without the need for human attention over a long period, and for those applications a minimal power drain is a must. [Dave Davenport] had an EPS8266-based moisture sensor, and became disappointed in having to replace its AA batteries …read more
Continue reading One ESP8266, One Battery, One Year… And Counting.