FlyingCam Is A Sweet DIY Webcam On A Stick

March 12, 2025 by Elliot Williams No comments

Imagine you want to monitor a pot on the stove to see if it’s boiling over for just a few minutes, but you don’t want to have a dedicated permanent IP webcam solution in your kitchen. [Sebastian Duell]’s FlyingCam hijacks an IKEA lamp gooseneck to become something you never knew you needed: a wireless camera for short-term random remote observation. It’s a beautiful combination of 3D printing and commercial device re-use, and when paired with his DIY wireless screen, it’s a complete solution.

The guts of this project aren’t critical, or expensive. It’s built around one of those ESP32 single-board webcams, with an added fan, battery pack, antenna, and a power switch. You turn it on, and the AP in the ESP32 fires up, or optionally connects to your network. Point the camera at your target and you’re set, at least if you want to sit by your computer. But [Sebastian] also designed a nice simple remote screen, so you can keep tabs on your spaghetti wherever you roam around the house.

We love the attention to keeping the design simple here, both in form and in function. It’s a one-task device, so it’s important that it be extremely easy to use, and it’s hard to beat just pointing the thing and turning on a switch. And it doesn’t hurt that it’s good looking to boot.

IKEA stuff is cheap and cheerful, but often it’s missing just that one functionality that we want. What good is an air-quality sensor without MQTT logging capability, for instance? Or a standing desk that can’t remember set heights? Get hacking!

Pixel Watch 3’s Loss Of Pulse Detection: The Algorithms That Tell Someone Is Dying

March 12, 2025 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

More and more of the ‘smart’ gadgets like watches and phones that we carry around with us these days come with features that we’d not care to ever need. Since these are devices that we strap onto our wrists and generally carry in close proximity to our bodies, they can use their sensors to make an estimation of whether said body is possibly in the process of expiring. This can be due to a severe kinetic event like a car crash, or something more subtle like the cessation of the beating of one’s heart.

There is a fairly new Loss of Pulse Detection (LoPD) feature in Google’s Pixel Watch 3 that recently got US FDA approval, allowing it to be made available in the US after previously becoming available in over a dozen European countries following its announcement in August of 2024. This opt-in feature regularly polls whether it can detect the user’s pulse. If not found, it cascades down a few steps before calling emergency services.

The pertinent question here is always whether it is truly detecting a crisis event, as nobody wants to regularly apologize for a false alert to the overworked person staffing the 911 or equivalent emergency line. So how do you reliably determine that your smart watch or phone should dial emergencies forthwith?

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Some Useful Notes On The 6805-EC10 Addressable RGB LED

March 12, 2025 by Dave Rowntree 6 Comments

LEDs are getting smaller and smaller, and the newest generations of indexable RGB LEDs are even fiddlier to use than their already diminutive predecessors. [Alex Lorman] has written some notes about the minuscule SK6805-EC10 series of LEDs, which may be helpful to those wanting to learn how to deal with these in a more controlled manner.

Most hardware types will be very familiar with the 5050-sized devices, sold as Neopixels in some circles, which are so-named due to being physically 5.0 mm x 5.0 mm in the horizontal dimensions. Many LEDs are specified by this simple width by depth manner. As for addressable RGB LEDs (although not all addressable LEDs are RGB, there are many weird and wonderful combinations out there!) the next most common standard size down the scale is the 2020, also known as the ‘Dotstar.’ These are small enough to present a real soldering challenge, and getting a good placement result needs some real skills.

[Alex] wanted to use the even smaller EC10 or 1111 devices, which measure a staggering 1.1 mm x 1.1 mm! Adafruit’s product page mentions that these are not intended for hand soldering, but we bet you want to try! Anyway, [Alex] has created a KiCAD footprint and a handy test PCB for characterizing and getting used to handling these little suckers, which may help someone on their way. They note that hot air reflow soldering needs low temperature paste (this scribe recommends using MG Chemicals branded T3 Sn₄₂Bi₅₇Ag₁ paste in this application) and a very low heat to avoid cracking the cases open. Also, a low air flow rate to prevent blowing them all over the desk would also be smart. Perhaps these are more suited to hot plate or a proper convection oven?

As a bonus, [Alex] has previously worked with the slightly larger SK6805-1515 device, with some good extra notes around an interesting nonlinearity effect and the required gamma correction to get good colour perception. We’ll leave that to you readers to dig into. Happy soldering!

We’ve not yet seen many projects using these 1111 LEDs, but here’s one we dug up using the larger 1515 unit.

I2C Sniffing Comes To The Bus Pirate 5

March 12, 2025 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

While the Bus Pirate 5 is an impressive piece of hardware, the software is arguably where the project really shines. Creator [Ian Lesnet] and several members of the community are constantly working to add new features and capabilities to the hardware hacking multi-tool, to the point that if your firmware is more than a few days old there’s an excellent chance there’s a fresher build available for you to try out.

One of the biggest additions from the last week or so of development has been the I2C sniffer — a valuable tool for troubleshooting or reverse engineering devices using the popular communications protocol. [Ian] has posted a brief demo video of it in action.

It’s actually a capability that was available in the “classic” versions of the Bus Pirate, but rather than porting the feature over from the old firmware, [Ian] decided to fold the MIT licensed pico_i2c_sniffer from [Juan Schiavoni] into the new codebase. Thanks to the RP2040’s PIO, the sniffer works at up to 500 kHz, significantly outperforming its predecessor.

Admittedly, I2C sniffing isn’t anything you couldn’t do with a cheap logic analyzer. But that means dealing with captures and making sure the protocol decoder is setup properly, among other bits of software tedium. In comparison, once you start the sniffer program on the Bus Pirate 5, I2C data will be dumped out to the terminal in real-time for as long as you care to see it. For reverse engineering, it’s also very easy to move quickly from sniffing I2C packets to replaying or modifying them within the Bus Pirate’s interface.

If you already have a Bus Pirate 5, all you need to do is flash the latest firmware from the automated build system, and get sniffing. On the fence about picking one up? Perhaps our hands-on review will help change your mind.