Collaborate Disseminate
Analog phones may be nearly obsolete today, but having served humanity for well over a century they’re quite likely to pop up in drawers or attics now and then. If …read more Continue reading How to Build Your Own Analog Phone Network
RS485 is a communication standard that should be part of the advanced hardware hacker’s arsenal; it’s not commonly encountered, but powerful exactly when you need it. It’s a physical layer …read more Continue reading Hacker Dictionary: RS-485 Will Go the Distance
You need a Swiss Army knife of serial communications? Ollie is a compact isolated USB adaptor that provides USB, CAN bus, and two UARTs at logic, RS-232, and RS-485 signaling levels, as well as an isolated power supply. [Slimelec] has managed to squeeze all this into a package the size …read more
Continue reading USB Adaptor Isolates Multiple Serial Interfaces
The wood-burning heater [g3gg0] has at home works perfectly, except for one flaw: the pellet reservoir needs to be manually refilled every few days. Humans being notoriously unreliable creatures, this critical task is sometimes overlooked, which naturally leads to literally chilling results.
With automatic fill systems expensive and difficult to …read more
Continue reading Heater Joins the Internet of Things with ESP32 Board
When his makerspace was gifted a pair of Luminator LED signs of the sort you might see on the front of a bus, [PWalsh] decided to pull one apart to see what made it tick. Along the way, he managed to reverse engineer its control protocol and replace its original …read more
LED matrix displays and flat-screen monitors have largely supplanted old-school electromechanical models for public signage. We think that’s a shame, but it’s also a boon for the tinkerer, as old displays can be had for a song these days in the online markets.
Such was the case for [John Whittington] and his flip-dot display salvaged from an old bus. He wanted to put the old sign back to work, but without a decent driver, he did what one does in these situations — he tore it down and reverse engineered the thing. Like most such displays, his Hannover Display 7 …read more
Continue reading Flip-Dot Display Brought Out of Retirement by New Drivers