Category Archives: particle photon

State Machine Controls Garage Door Over The Internet

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Home automation has been a hot-button topic time and again since the dawn of the personal computer age. These days, thanks to modern communications technology, it’s possible to do some pretty cool stuff. [Brad Harbert] decided to automate his garage door, controlling it over the Internet.

The build relies on a Particle Photon to do the heavy lifting of connecting the door to the Internet. Particle offer a cloud service that makes setting up such a project easy for the first timer, and [Brad] was able to get things working quickly. A relay is used to activate the garage door …read more

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Alexa And Particle Modernize Coffee Machine By One Iota

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When [Steve Parker]’s girlfriend got a tea kettle that takes voice commands, he suddenly saw his fancy bean-to-cup coffee machine as a technological dinosaur. It may make good coffee, but getting the DeLonghi going is inconvenient, because it runs a self-cleaning cycle each time it’s turned on or off.

Thus began [Steve]’s adventure in trying to turn the thing on with Alexa via Particle Photon. Because of the way the machine is designed, simply adding a relay wouldn’t do—the machine would just turn off and back on, only to start the self-clean again. Once inside, he found it’s controlled by …read more

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Will Hack For Espresso

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[Avidan Ross] has an unyielding passion for coffee. Brewing a proper espresso is more than measuring fluid ounces, and to that end, his office’s current espresso machine was not making the cut. What’s a maker to do but enlist his skills to brew some high-tech coffee.

For a proper espresso, the mass of the grounds and the brewed output need to be precisely measured. So, the office La Marzocco GS3 has been transformed into a closed-loop espresso machine with a Particle Photon and an Acaia Lunar waterproof scale at its heart.

On the software side, to run the ‘smart brew’ …read more

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Use the Force to Turn On This Lamp

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Holocrons are holographic data storage devices used in the Star Wars universe by both Jedi and Sith as teaching devices or for storing valuable information. After the fall of the Jedi, they became rare and closely guarded artifacts. [DaveClarke] built one to light the room.

[DaveClarke] built the lamp around a Particle Photon – a STM32 ARM-M0 based microcontroller with a Cypress wifi chip. All [Dave] needed for the workings were an IR proximity sensor, a servo and a bunch of super-bright white LEDs. When the sensor detects something, it starts up the system. The servo rotates a gear which …read more

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Sense All the Things with a Synthetic Sensor

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What will it take to make your house smarter than you? Judging from the price of smart appliances we see in the home centers these days, it’ll take buckets of cash. But what if you could make your home smarter — or at least more observant — with a few cheap, general purpose “supersensors” that watch your every move?

Sounds creepy, right? That’s what [Gierad Laput] and his team at the Carnegie Mellon Human-Computer Interaction Institute thought when they designed their broadband “synthetic sensor,” and it’s why they purposely omitted a camera from their design. But just about every other …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Another Internet Button

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It’s long been a staple of future-gazing, the idea that we will reach a moment at which all of life’s comforts can be summoned at the press of a button. Through the magic of technology, that is, without the army of human servants with which wealthy Victorians surrounded themselves to achieve the same aim.

Of course, to reach this button-pressing Nirvana, someone has to make the buttons. There are plenty of contenders for the prize of One Button To Rule Them All, the one we’ll probably have seen the most of is Amazon’s Dash. Today though we’re bringing you another …read more

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Bacon Beacon

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The device featured here is quite simple, but it’s well executed and involves bacon, so what’s not to like!

They take their bacon sandwiches seriously in Dundee. And let us tell you, in Scotland they make good bacon! At the co-working space where [Grant Richmond] works, people were missing out on the chance to order when someone went to the bacon sandwich emporium for a refill.

His solution was the Bacon Beacon, a nicely lasercut box with a series of buttons on top connected to a Particle Photon microcontroller. Press a button, and a node.js web app is called on …read more

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