Collaborate Disseminate
These days displays are increasingly expected to be bidirectional devices, accepting not only touch inputs, but also to integrate fingerprint sensing and even somehow combine a camera with a display …read more Continue reading Using an OLED Display’s Light for Embedded Sensors
LEDs are a wonderful technology. You put in a little bit of power, and you get out a wonderful amount of light. They’re efficient, cheap, and plentiful. We use them …read more Continue reading You Can Use LEDs As Sensors, Too
Proximity sensors are common enough in automation projects that we hardly give them a second thought — pick something with specs that match the job and move on. But they …read more Continue reading Souped-Up Reflective Sensor Uses Itself for Wireless Programming
Input devices that can handle rough and tumble environments aren’t nearly as varied as their more fragile siblings. [Alastair Aitchison] has devised a brilliant way of detecting inputs from plumbing …read more Continue reading Plumbing Valves as Heavy Duty Analog Inputs
No one likes a flickering light source, but lighting is often dependent on the quality of a building’s main AC power. Light intensity has a close relation to the supply …read more Continue reading Measuring LED Flicker, With Phototransistor and Audio App
In need of a waveform generator for another project, [David Cook] crammed out the old turntable to modify it for a handy hack: By adding a simple reflectance sensor to the pickup he turned it into a waveform generator that optically plays back arbitrary waveforms from printed paper discs.
For his hack, [Dave] created a 3D printed mount, which attaches a LED and a photodiode to the pickup of the turntable. The mount also blocks most of the ambient light, allowing only the reflected light from the paper disc to reach the sensor through a small slit. A little breadboard …read more
