Author: Zoe Skyforest

3776 Articles

Building A Better Automotive Rotary Controller

May 21, 2026 by 9 Comments

If you’ve ever spent time in a modern BMW, you’ve probably fussed about with the goofy iDrive controller. It’s a rotary knobbery slidery thing that just never really feels that good to use. [Garage Tinkering] was inspired to try and build a better version for his own car.

The first order of business was to choose the right knob as the core of the build. [Garage Tinkering] eventually landed on the Crowpanel 1.28″ rotary knob which integrates a push-button encoder, a round screen, and an ESP32-S3 all into one convenient package. He then set about designing a 3D printed housing that would integrate it into the vehicle’s interior, along with a diffuser ring for the knob’s inbuilt LEDs and some additional buttons for added control. The goal is to use the rotary control as the human interface for a broader system being implemented in the vehicle, which will feature a larger infotainment screen and multiple digital gauges. The rotary control will allow switching things like interior and underglow lighting, and display of other vehicle parameters.

The cool thing about building your own gear is that you can make it work exactly the way that suits you. We’ve seen great hacks in this realm before, too, like this rad car data display.

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Building Festival Badges That Sync Themselves Up

May 20, 2026 by 4 Comments

Lots of music events these days hand out various glowing tchotchkes that flash and sync up with the performance. [Tony Goacher] has whipped up his own badges that can do just that, all without needing any sort of pairing or infrastructure to speak of.

The CrowdClock badges each feature a ring of 16 addressable RGB LEDs. Running the LEDs is an ESP32 microcontroller, which has lots of neat wireless capability baked in from the factory. [Tony] decided to leverage the ESP-NOW wireless communication protocol to enable each badge to broadcast its current local clock tick. Each device also listens out for clock ticks from other badges in the area, and updates its current clock tick value if it receives a higher one from another badge. This behaviour allows a bunch of badges within radio range to all sync up automatically in short order, and then run their LED sequences in sync. There’s no need for a master designation or anything, the devices just all sync to whichever badge has the highest clock value and go from there.

It’s a really neat way to create propagating self-syncing behaviour in distributed wireless nodes. Files are on Github for those curious to learn more. Meanwhile, if you’ve ever wondered how those concert wristbands work, we’ve looked at that too. Video after the break.

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DIY Potentiometer Is A Great Teaching Aid

May 20, 2026 by 16 Comments

A potentiometer is a simple electrical device that allows resistance to be varied at will. Most everyone in the electronics field is intimately familiar with how they work on a fundamental level. Of course, we all had to be taught once, though, and a great way to do that would be with a teaching tool like the one [DiscoLapy] built.

What you’re looking at here is a very simple potentiometer that bares its function for all to see. It consists of a 3D printed base and knob, which form the mechanical part of the device. A paper track is then laid on top to act as the main resistive element, once properly covered with graphite from a regular old pencil. From there, it’s as simple as adding the necessary contacts and wiper to the device, and you’ve got a potentiometer sitting in front of you.

What’s great about this build is that it’s very intuitive. Just by looking at it or putting it together, you get a straightforward understanding of everything that’s going on. By drawing the resistive trace, and by turning the knob, particularly if hooked up to an LED or something like in the demonstration, it’s easy to see how the potentiometer varies its resistance and affects a circuit.

We’ve featured some other fantastic teaching tools in the past, too. If you’ve got your own educational gems, be sure to let us know.

Between-Device Sharing Still Sucks

May 20, 2026 by 131 Comments

Once upon a time, computing was simple. You had files on a floppy disk. If you wanted to take them to a different computer, you ejected the disk from one machine and put it in another. It wasn’t fast, but it was easy and intuitive. Besides, you probably only had one computer of your own, anyway.

Life has since gotten a lot more complex. You’ve got a desktop, a laptop, a work laptop, your personal and business phones, and a smart watch to boot. You live amongst a swirling maelstrom of terabytes of data. Despite all the technical advances that got you here, it’s still a pain to get a file from one device to another, even when they’re sitting on the same desk. Why?!

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DecayDock Keeps Track Of Spoilage

May 20, 2026 by 12 Comments

Many of us have suffered the common experience of buying a great deal of (now very expensive) food, only to have it go off before it can be consumed. [ptallthings93] has whipped up a simple device to try and tackle this problem.

The result is DecayDock, which lives on a fridge and tries to keep track of what’s going on inside. It achieves this with the use of an ESP32-CAM module, which combines the capable microcontroller with a camera for image detection work. With the aid of an Edge AI model, it’s able to detect common food items that are held in front of the camera, which are in turn added to an internal inventory. The items are tracked over time based on expected shelf lives, and the freshness of various items in the fridge is displayed on an attached LCD screen with a green/yellow/red color coding system.

The system is only making estimates—it’s not able to actually identify when the cheese has gone moldy or the milk has gone sour. Still, if you struggle to remember what you should be prioritizing to use in your fridge, it might be a handy aid.

Ultimately, we never really saw smart fridges dominate the market, even though the idea has long been a popular one in futurist circles. Perhaps none of them thought that nobody really wants to stand staring down at a screen on the fridge all day. In reality, some areas of the home are best left unsmartified.

Building A Device To Map Magnetic Fields

May 19, 2026 by 3 Comments

Magnetic fields are all around us. We can’t really feel or see them ourselves, per se, but we can map them with the right hardware, like this device built by [edosari50].

The build uses an ESP32 microcontroller, which is built on to a board with an integrated 4.3″ touchscreen LCD. It’s paired with an Arduino Nano, which does the work of actually talking to a pair of EMS100 Fluxgate magnetic sensors. The slower, less capable Arduino handles the low-level chatter and then passes the readouts to the ESP32 over a UART connection. Power is courtesy of a pair of 18650 lithium-ion cells, and a XL4005 DC-DC converter. A lithium-ion charging module is on hand to keep the batteries topped off safely.  Scan results are visualized on the device itself using a heatmap representation, and can also be exported to SD card for later analysis if so desired.

Unless you’re in the geological field or otherwise hunting for stuff underground, this probably isn’t a tool you’ll have a lot of use for. However, if you like finding magnetic anomalies and investigating them, it might be very much in your wheelhouse. We’ve featured other tools for magnetic visualization before, too. Video after the break.
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Building A Pip Boy Themed Smartwatch

May 19, 2026 by 9 Comments

One of the problems with good science fiction is that it introduces us to all kinds of cool devices that we can’t actually have in real life. [Huy Vector] has tried to fix that a little with this fantastic smartwatch build inspired by everybody’s favorite wrist computer from the Fallout series.

The build is based around a Xiao ESP32-S3 board, which hosts the capable microcontroller and has all that useful wireless connectivity built in. It’s hooked up to a MAX30102 heart rate sensor to collect the wearer’s vital signs, as well as a 1.54″ LCD screen for displaying the fantastic Pip Boy themed interface. Power is courtesy of a small lithium-ion cell tucked in behind the display. A little copper tubing and brass hardware helps tie everything together, with the latter serving as capacitive touch points for controlling the device. A simple leather watch strap completes the build.

It’s a bit of a diversion from the classic Pip Boy design, in that it’s a small smartwatch instead of a chunky device that takes up most of the wearer’s forearm. However, this isn’t so bad in reality—it’s far more practical while still rocking those classic green-on-black graphics that we all love so much.

If you’re craving a more authentic Pip Boy recreation, we’ve featured a few of those, too.

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