Ultimate Garage Door Control Does The Job Brilliantly

May 30, 2023 by 21 Comments

[Stephen Carey] had previously relied on an Insteon garage door controller, only to have it perform poorly and fail at integrating with Alexa properly. Thus, he did what any good hacker would do, and built his own system instead.

The garage door was first outfitted with a pair of reed switches to sense when it was fully open or fully closed. The drive sprocket of the garage door was also set up to be monitored with magnets and Hall effect sensors, essentially creating a rotary encoder. This allows a ESP32 to monitor the door’s direction of travel, it’s position, and when it has hit the end stop in either direction. Using Micropython, [Stephen] whipped up some code to tie the garage door controls in with Home Assistant, complete with a neat visual display of the current door position.

There are millions of home automation products out there, many of which make annoying compromises that frustrate the end user. Sometimes, doing it your own way is the only way to get satisfaction!

Hackaday Prize 2023: EyeBREAK Could Be A Breakthrough

May 30, 2023 by 4 Comments

For those with strokes or other debilitating conditions, control over one’s eyelid can be one of the last remaining motor functions. Inspired by [Jeremiah Denton] blinking in Morse code on a televised interview, [MBW] designed an ESP32-based device to decode blinks into words.

While an ESP32 offers Bluetooth for simulating a keyboard and has a relatively low power draw, getting a proper blink detection system to run at 20 frames per second in a constrained environment is challenging. Earlier attempts used facial landmarks to try and determine, based on ratios, whether an eye was open or closed. A cascade detector combined with an XGBoost classifier offered excellent performance but struggled when the eye wasn’t centered. Ultimately a 50×50, 4-layer CNN in TensorFlow Lite processes the camera frames, producing a single output, eye open or closed. For debugging purposes, it streams camera frames over Wi-Fi with annotations via OpenCV, though getting OpenCV to compile for ESP32 was also nontrivial.

[MBW] trained the model using the MRL dataset and then quantized to int8. Getting the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi stacks to run concurrently was a bit of a pain, as was managing RAM. After exhausting SRAM and IRAM, [MBW] had to move to PRAM. The entire system is built into some lightweight goggles and makes for a fairly comfortable experience.

While TensorFlow and microcontrollers might seem like a bit of an odd couple, at the end of the day, the inference engine is just doing some math on an array of inputs with some weights. We’ve even seen TensorFlow Lite on a Commodore 64. If you don’t know about [Admiral Jerimiah Denton] we can shed some light on it for you.

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Supercon 2022: [Jorvon Moss] Gives His Robots A Soul

May 30, 2023 by 6 Comments

How do you approach your robot designs? Maybe, you do it from a ‘oh, I have these cool parts’ position, or from a ‘I want to make a platform on wheels for my experiments’ perspective. In that case, consider that there’s a different side to robot building – one where you account for your robot’s influence on what other people around feel about them, and can get your creations the attention they deserve. [Jorvon ‘Odd-Jayy’ Moss]’s robots are catchy in a way that many robot designs aren’t, and they routinely go viral online. What are his secrets to success? A combination of an art background, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration, and a trove of self-taught electronics skills helped him develop a standout approach to robot building.

Now, [Jorvon] has quite a few successful robot projects under his belt, and at Supercon 2022, he talks about how our robots’ looks and behaviour shapes their perception. How do your own robots look to others, and what feelings do they evoke? With [Jorvon], you will go through fundamentals of what makes a robot look lively, remarkable, catchy or creepy, and it’s his unique backgrounds that let him give you a few guidelines on what you should and should not do when building a certain kind of robot.

You’ll do good watching this video – it’s short and sweet, and shows you a different side to building robots of your dreams; plus, the robot riding around on the stage definitely makes this presentation one of a kind. No matter your robot’s technical complexity, it’s significant that it can make people go ‘wow’ when they see it. Not all robots are there to single-mindedly perform a simple task, after all – some are meant to travel around the world.

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DIY 3D Printed Rain Gauge Connects To Home Assistant

May 30, 2023 by 17 Comments

Measuring local rainfall has real practical uses, especially in agriculture, but most of us will have to admit that it’s at least partly about drawing cool graphs on a screen. Whatever your motivation, you can build this open source electronic rain gauge designed by [Sebastian] of Smart Solutions for Home, and integrate it with Home Assistant.

This 3D printed rain gauge is of the ubiquitous tipping bucket type and uses a magnet and hall effect sensor to detect every time the bucket tips out. The sensor is soldered to a custom PCB with ESP32 configured using ESP Home. By keeping it in deep sleep most of the time and only waking up when the tip of the bucket, [Sebastian] estimates it can run about a year on four AA batteries, depending on rainfall. The hinge mechanism is adjustable to ensure that both buckets will tip with the same volume of water.

FDM 3D printed enclosures are not known for being waterproof, so [Sebastian] coated the PCB with varnish to protect it from moisture. This worked well enough that he could leave it running in a bowl of water for a few hours without any ill effects. The end result looks good and should be able to handle the outdoors for a long time.

Building a weather station is a popular DIY project. Some of the interesting varieties we’ve seen are powered by supercapacitors, show readings on antique analog dials and convert parking distance sensor kit into a wind gauge.

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Methane-Tracking Satellites Hunt For Nasty Greenhouse Gas Emissions

May 30, 2023 by 41 Comments

Much of the reporting around climate change focuses on carbon dioxide. It’s public enemy number one when it comes to gases that warm the atmosphere, as a primary byproduct of fossil fuel combustion.

It’s not the only greenhouse gas out there, though. Methane itself is a particularly potent pollutant, and one that is being emitted in altogether excessive amounts. Satellites are now on the hunt for methane emissions in an attempt to save the world from this odorless, colorless gas.

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Will Electric Tractors Farm Your Food?

May 30, 2023 by 119 Comments

There are two professions used to driving single-seaters with hundreds of horsepower, one of which is very exclusive and the other of which can be found anywhere the ground is fertile enough to support agriculture. Formula One drivers operate fragile machines pushed to the edges of their performance envelope, while the tractor at the hands of a farmer is designed to reliably perform huge tasks on dodgy ground in all weathers. Today’s tractor is invariably a large machine powered by a diesel engine, and it’s the equal of all tasks on a modern farm. Against that backdrop then it’s interesting to read the Smithsonian magazine’s look at the emerging world of electric tractors. Will they replace diesel as the source of traction in the fields?

Farm-ng’s Amiga

The two firms they focus on first are Monarch Tractor, and Solectrac. Both manufacturers offer small machines of the type we’d be inclined to describe as an orchard tractor, and Monarch are offering an autonomous option as part of their package. They also feature Farm-ng, whose machine called amusingly the Amiga, is a much smaller affair which we are guessing would be super-useful on a very intensive operation such as market gardening. We’re especially pleased to see that the emerging small electric tractor industry is embracing right to repair, something the traditional manufacturers are famous for ignoring.

It’s obvious that none of these machines are going to revolutionize the world of large high-power tractors any time soon, as they are too small for the job and can’t offer the 24/7 operation required at busy times on a farm. But it’s obvious they would be very useful on a small farm, and in particular for those tractor applications where the machine is a platform which goes from place to place to aid static work, they could be better than their diesel equivalents.

It’s odd that over the years we’ve not covered any electric tractors before. Perhaps that is, until you search instead for agricultural robots.

South Korea Successfully Sends Satellites To Orbit

May 30, 2023 by 8 Comments

South Korea’s KARI ( Korea Aerospace Research Institute ) successfully put a commercial satellite into orbit Thursday, achieving another milestone in their domestic space program. The Nuri rocket (aka KLSV-2) left the Naro Space Center launch pad on the southern coast of the peninsula at 18:24 KST, after a communications glitch in the pad’s helium tank facility caused a one-day slip. The primary payload was the 180 kg refrigerator-sized Earth observation satellite NEXTSat-2. It uses synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and also has instruments to observe neutrons in near-Earth orbit due to the impact of solar activity on cosmic radiation. In addition, seven CubeSats were successfully deployed:

  • Justek JLC-101-V1.2, to verify satellite orbital control system
  • Lumir, measuring cosmic radiation and testing rad-hardened microprocessor design
  • Cairo Space, weather observation and space debris technology demonstration
  • KASI-SAT (Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute) SNIPE, actually four nano-sats which will achieve a 500 km – 600 km polar orbit and fly in formation to measure plasma variations.

It seems that SNIPE-C, Justek, and Lumir are having communication troubles and may be lost. Ground controllers are still searching. This launch comes almost one year after the previous launch of a dummy satellite in June, which we wrote about last year.

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