ESP8266 Adds WiFi Logging To IKEA’s Air Quality Sensor

July 24, 2021 by 38 Comments

Introduced back in June, the IKEA VINDRIKTNING is a $12 USD sensor that uses colored LEDs to indicate the relative air quality in your home depending on how many particles it sucks up. Looking to improve on this simplistic interface, [Sören Beye] tacked an ESP8266 to the board so it can broadcast sensor readings out over MQTT.

Just three wires link the ESP8266 to the PCB.

While some of us would have been tempted to gut the VINDRIKTNING and attach its particle sensor directly to the ESP8266, the approach [Sören] has used is actually quite elegant. Rather than replacing IKEA’s electronics, the microcontroller is simply listening in on the UART communications between the sensor and the original controller. This not only preserves the stock functionality of the VINDRIKTNING, but simplifies the code as the ESP doesn’t need to do nearly as much.

All you need to do if you want to perform this modification is solder a couple wires to convenient test pads on the VINDRIKTNING board, then flash the firmware (or write your own version), and you’re good to go. There’s plenty of room inside the case for the ESP8266, though you may want to tape it down so it doesn’t impact air flow.

While not required, [Sören] also recommends making a small modification to the VINDRIKTNING which makes it a bit quieter. Apparently the 5 V fan inside the sensor is occasionally revved up by the original controller, rather than kept at a continuous level that you can mentally tune out. But by attaching the sensor’s fan to the ESP8266’s 3.3 V pin, it will run continuously at a lower speed.

We’ve seen custom firmware for IKEA products before, but this approach, which keeps the device’s functionality intact regardless of what’s been flashed to the secondary microcontroller, is particularly appealing for those of us who can’t seem to keep the gremlins out of our code.

[Thanks to nexgensri for the tip.]

Hands-On: CCCamp2019 Badge Is A Sensor Playground Not To Be Mistaken For A Watch

August 29, 2019 by 19 Comments

Last weekend 5,000 people congregated in a field north of Berlin to camp in a meticulously-organized, hot and dusty wonderland. The optional, yet official, badge for the 2019 Chaos Communication Camp was a bit tardy to proliferate through the masses as the badge team continued assembly while the camp raged around them. But as each badge came to life, the blinkies that blossomed each dusk became even more joyful as thousands strapped on their card10s.

Yet you shouldn’t be fooled, that’s no watch… in fact the timekeeping is a tacked-on afterthought. Sure you wear it on your wrist, but two electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors for monitoring heart health are your first hint at the snoring dragon packed inside this mild-mannered form-factor. The chips in question are the MAX30001 and the MAX86150 (whose primary role is as a pulse sensor but also does ECG). We have high-res ADCs just waiting to be misused and the developers ran with that, reserving some of the extra pins on the USB-C connector for external devices.

There was a 10€ kit on offer that let you solder up some electrode pads (those white circles with gel and a snap for a solid interface with your body’s electrical signals) to a sacrificial USB-C cable. Remember, all an ECG is doing is measuring electrical impulses, and you can choose how to react to them. During the workshop, one of the badge devs placed the pads on his temples and used the card10 badge to sense left/right eye movement. Wicked! But there are a lot more sensors waiting for you on these two little PCBs.

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You’re Sitting On An Engineering Masterpiece: Chairs As A Design Challenge

June 25, 2019 by 26 Comments

If you move as a hardware hacker through the sometimes surprisingly similar world of artists, craftspeople, designers, blacksmiths, and even architects, there’s one piece of work that you will see time and time again as an object that exerts a curious fascination. It seems that designing and building a chair is a rite of passage, and not just a simple chair, but in many cases an interesting chair.

An American-made Windsor chair from the turn of the 19th century. Los Angeles County Museum of Art [Public domain]
An American-made Windsor chair from the turn of the 19th century. Los Angeles County Museum of Art [Public domain]
Some of the most iconic seating designs that you will be instantly familiar with through countless mass-produced imitations began their lives as one-off design exercises. Yet we rarely see them in our community of hackers and makers, a search turns up only a couple of examples. This is surprising, not least because there is more than meets the eye to this particular piece of furniture. Your simple seat can be a surprisingly complex challenge.

Moving Charis From Artisan to Mass Market

The new materials and mass production techniques of the 19th and 20th centuries have brought high-end design into the hands of the masses, but while wealthy homes in earlier centuries had high-quality bespoke furniture in the style of the day, the traditional furniture of the masses was hand-made in the same way for centuries often to a particular style dependent on the region in which it was produced.

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Street with polluted smoggy air

Serious Chemical Threat Sniffer On A Budget

September 16, 2025 by 40 Comments

Chemical warfare detection was never supposed to be a hobbyist project. Yet here we are: Air Quality Guardian by [debdoot], the self-proclaimed world’s first open source chemical threat detection system, claims to pack lab-grade sensing into an ESP32-based build for less than $100. Compare that with $10,000+ black-box hardware and you see why this is worth trying at home, even if this project might not have the nut cracked just yet.

Unlike your air monitor from IKEA, the device aims to analyze raw gas sensor resistance – ohm-level data most devices throw away – combined with temporal spikes, humidity correlations, and a database of 35+ signatures. Of course, there is a lot of work to be done here on the calibration side, and we don’t have any chemical warfare agents on hand to test against, so we have no idea how well it works, and we’d expect false positives. Still, the idea of taking a more granular look at the data coming off the sensor may bear some fruit.

(Editor’s note: edited with a hefty dash of skeptical salt.)

Featured Image by Arjun Lama on Unsplash

FlyingCam Is A Sweet DIY Webcam On A Stick

March 12, 2025 by 5 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!

A Buzzing, Flashing Phone Ringer For The Elderly

October 11, 2023 by 8 Comments

For a lonely person, elderly or otherwise, the sound of a ringing phone can be music to the ears, unless of course it’s another spam call. But what good is a phone when you can’t hear it well enough to answer?

[Giovanni Aggiustatutto] was tasked with building an additional ringer for a set of cordless landline phones belonging to an elderly friend. Rather than try to intercept the signal, [Giovanni] chose to simply mic up the phone base that’s connected to the phone port on the router and send a signal over Wi-Fi to a second box which has a loud piezo buzzer and a handful of LEDs.

At the heart of this build is a pair of ESP8266 Wemos D1 minis and an Arduino sound sensor module inside a pair of really nice-looking 3D printed boxen that may or may not have been inspired by an IKEA air quality sensor. On the receiving side, a green LED indicates the system is working, and the red LEDs flash as soon as a call comes in.

All the code, schematics, and STL files are available for this build, and between the Instructable and the build video after the break, you should have no trouble replicating it for the hard-of-hearing in your life.

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e-paper display showing hand-drawn fonts attached to a custom controller PCB

Recycling Junk E-tags Into A LoRaWAN AQI Sensor

September 28, 2022 by 6 Comments
E-paper interfacing circuit is just a simple switched-mode power supply
Interfacing to E-paper displays is nothing to be scared of

[Aduecho] had seen those cheap eBay deals of e-paper-based pricing tags, and was wondering if they could be hacked to perform some other tasks. After splitting the case open, the controller chip was discovered to be a SEM9110, with some NFC hardware support but little else. [aduecho] was hoping to build some IoT-connected air quality indicator (AQI) units but the lack of a datasheet for SEM9110 plus no sensors in place meant the only real course of action was to junk the PCB and just keep the E-paper display and the batteries. These units appeared to be ‘new old’ stock, so there was a good chance that both would be fresh and ripe for picking.

The PCB [aduecho] came up with is mechanically the same as the original unit, but now sports a Seeed studio Wio-E5 LoRa module, which uses the STM32WLE5 from ST for the heavy lifting. This has what looks like a Semtech SX126x integrated on-die (we can’t think of a sane way an actual SX126x die could be flip-chip mounted, but you never know). Using this module is a snap, needing only very minimal antenna-matching components and a spot of decoupling to function. On the sensing side of things, a Bosch BME680 gas sensor handling the AQI measurements, and a Bosch BMI270 6-axis IMU, provides a gyro and accelerometer, for all those planned user interaction features. As can be seen from the schematic, interfacing the EPD is pretty straightforward, just a handful of parts are needed to generate the necessary bipolar gate voltages via a simple SMPS circuit. The display controller handles it all internally, programmed via an SPI interface.

One area we’re quite fond of in this project are the neat hand-drawn icons, and variable width font, giving the display a kind of note-like quality when drawn on the low-ish contrast e-paper display.

Air quality measurement projects grace these pages from time to time, like this hacked Ikea Vindriktning, and this very similar Wio-E5-based project we covered last month.