2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: Simple Window Closer Relies On Gravity

March 13, 2024 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

While most pet owners are happy to help out their furry friends, everyone has a limit. For [Gauthier], getting up to open or close the window every three minutes so their cat can go out on the balcony was a bridge too far, so they decided to take a crack at automating the window. The end result not only does the job, it’s extremely low-tech and pretty much invisible except when in use.

Of course, [Gauthier] didn’t arrive at this solution immediately. Their first thoughts went to RFID or perhaps a pressure sensor to detect the cats, coupled with something motorized to open and shut the window, like a belt or maybe a linear actuator. But ultimately, the system has to be robust, so that’s when [Gauthier] got the idea to employ gravity by using pulleys and weights.

Due to the configuration of the space and the shape of the window, [Gauthier] was able to to hide cable pretty well — you can’t really see anything when the window is closed. Be sure to check it out in action after the break. Continue reading “2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: Simple Window Closer Relies On Gravity” →

2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: Plantpal Is A Friend To You Both

March 8, 2024 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

One easy way to get started on the home automation front is with something that makes a house a home in the first place — lush, green plants. As nice as it is to have them around, it can be difficult to care (or remember to care) for them all the time.

Plantpal makes easy work of that, with an e-paper display that makes it plain as day how your plant is feeling. As you might expect, it features a soil moisture sensor, but what might be unexpected is that it’s capacitive instead of the usual resistive type. This way, no traces are exposed to the elements of plant life. It also has a BME688 sensor to monitor air quality and CO₂, so your plant has the chance to thrive.

Around back you’ll find an ESP32-C6, an AEM10941 for solar energy harvesting, and another set of solar panels. Be sure to check out the project’s GitHub if you want to learn more about this adorable and useful device.

Our Home Automation Contest Starts Now!

February 20, 2024 by Elliot Williams 32 Comments

Your home is your castle, and what’s better than a fully automatic castle? Nothing! That’s why we’re inviting you to submit your sweetest home automation hacks for a chance to win one of three $150 DigiKey gift certificates. The contest starts now and runs until April 16th.

Home buttons project, simple home automation display — [Matej]’s Home Buttons gets the job done in open-source style.

We love to play around with home automation setups and have seen our fair share, ranging from the simple “turn some lights on” to full-blown cyber-brains that learn your habits and adapt to them. Where is your project on this continuum?

Whether you’re focused on making your life easier, saving energy, gathering up all the data about your usage patterns, or simply stringing some random functions together and calling it a “system,” we’d like to see it. Nothing is too big or too small if it makes your home life easier.

Home is where the home automation is!

To enter, head over to Hackaday IO and start documenting your project there. We are, of course, interested in learning from what you’ve done, so the better the docs, the better your chances of winning. And if you need some inspiration, check out these honorable mention categories.

Honorable Mention Categories

Creature Comforts: Does your system make your house a home? Maybe it turns on and off the heaters to keep rooms just right, opens and closes the blinds for you, or maybe it turns on the nightlights when you’re heading downstairs for a midnight snack. The Creature Comforts category is for you.
Efficiency: Automation isn’t just about convenience, but can help us save energy too. If your machines help you save money on your power and heating bills, show us!
Rube Goldberg: A “system” sounds so formal, but a lot of ad hoc home automation projects are nonetheless super effective. If your home system grew organically and maybe resembles a collection of hacks more than a carefully orchestrated plan, it could be a Rube Goldberg setup.
All the Data: An automatic home makes a lot of data along the way. If you have a slick system for displaying it, or even just collecting it all, we’d love to see it.
Retrofit: Not everything works like you’d want it to out of the box. Maybe you’ve hacked into an air purification system or your washing machine to get it to play along? That’s a home automation retrofit.

Thanks again to DigiKey for sponsoring this with three gift certificates!

2023 Halloween Hackfest: This Year’s Spooky Winners

November 20, 2023 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

With the zombies, ghouls, and ghosts now safely returned to their crypts until next October, it’s time to unveil this year’s winners for the 2023 Halloween Hackfest.

For this contest, sponsors DigiKey and Arduino challenged the community to come up with their best creations for what’s arguably the most hacker-friendly of holidays. Pretty much everything was fair game, from costumes to decorations. The top three winners will get $150 credit from DigiKey and some treats from Arduino — just don’t try to eat them.

Continue reading “2023 Halloween Hackfest: This Year’s Spooky Winners” →

2023 Halloween Hackfest: A Spooky “Severance” Speaker

October 18, 2023 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

If you know, you know. After becoming fully engrossed in the sci-fi psycho-thriller “Severance“, [Ben Brooks] absolutely needed to have a version of the ominous speaker known as the Board.

This speaker represents the Board, who is the enigmatic governing body of Lumon Industries, the fictional and gigantic biotechnology company featured in the show.

The Board cultivates an air of mystery by rarely speaking, and when it does, it speaks through a single person who paraphrases the Board’s responses. The audio that comes out is a mix of the show’s theme song, pertinent show quotes, and static.

The guts of this freaky little thing are pretty simple — an ESP8266, a DF Player Mini, and a couple of small speakers. In fact, [Ben] had all the parts leftover from a previous home automation project, including the PCB.

Although the original plan was to program it in Arduino, [Ben] ended up using ESPHome to make it easier to integrate with sensors for the big night. Be sure to check out the demo video after the break.

We’ve seen a few fun hacks for the porch this year, including the treat trough of terror and this Ouija robot that out-creeps the real thing.

Continue reading “2023 Halloween Hackfest: A Spooky “Severance” Speaker” →

2023 Halloween Hackfest: Candy Basket Sees You Coming

October 14, 2023 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

On Halloween, some people can’t or don’t want to open the door for various reasons. Maybe they have a cat that likes to escape every chance it gets, or maybe their favorite TV show is on during prime trick-or-treating time. Whatever the case, we think it’s perfectly acceptable to leave a bowl of candy outside the door, especially if there are electronics involved.

In this case, the bowl detects trick-or-treaters and candy eaters using an LD2410 60 GHz radar sensor and an RP2040. A light pipe shows orange when a person is detected, and switches over to green as they come closer, as if to say you may have candy now.

Nothing happens after that, but now that we think about it, it would be cool to add an MP3 decoder and a speaker to play a little witch cackle or something once they’ve had a chance to stick their hand in the bucket.

[Mike Kushnerik] actually designed the PCB a few months ago for non-Halloween purposes: some home automation projects. But then they were trying to think of something for Halloween, and this delightful light-up bucket came to mind. In addition to the RP2040 chip, there’s a 128 MB flash chip, a WS2812 LED, and a header for communicating with the radar sensor over UART. Be sure to check out the brief demo video after the break.

If you’d like to stand outside and give out candy, at least send it down a light-up slide or something.

Continue reading “2023 Halloween Hackfest: Candy Basket Sees You Coming” →

2023 Halloween Hackfest: Flickering Pumpkin Pin Is Solidly Built

October 4, 2023 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

Now first of all, [Steph] grants that you can already take your pick of several LED pumpkin badges out there on IO. That’s not the point. The point is that this flickering pumpkin pin is nicely-built as well as being open source.

Even though it’s fully featured — it flickers, it’s wearable, and it’s lightweight — the build couldn’t be more simple. It’s fancy through-hole LEDs and a coin cell holder, plus a tack pin to stick it through your shirt. But the final result is quite elegant thanks to clever use of PCB layering.

The first version was to get all the layers right to let the light through and embellish the jack-o-lantern’s lines with manufacturer-applied silver solder, but as [Steph] points out, it looked ‘like something a disturbed child might carve into their desk in detention’. So [Steph] enlisted [Mx. Jack Nelson], who improved the artwork.

Pretty much every component does double duty here, including the tack pin — it serves as a switch because it can hold the battery in place. The battery’s edges reflect the glowing light quite nicely around the edge of the pin. And the LEDs beneath the battery prevent it from slipping out. You can see how it goes together in the video after the break.

Continue reading “2023 Halloween Hackfest: Flickering Pumpkin Pin Is Solidly Built” →