home hacks

1846 Articles

A photo of the circuitry in its case

GarageMinder: Automatic Garage Door

July 19, 2025 by 12 Comments

After getting a new car, [Solo Pilot] missed the automatic garage door opening and closing system their old car had. So they set about building their own, called GarageMinder. On the project page you will find a bill of materials, schematics, and some notes about the approach taken in various versions of the software. [Solo Pilot] also made the software available.

The basic hardware centers around a Raspberry Pi Zero W, but there are plans to switch to an ESP32. From the car side of things there are built-in continuous Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) advertisement broadcasts, which the Raspberry Pi can detect. Building a reliable system on top of these unreliable signals is difficult and you can read about some of the challenges and approaches that were taken during development. This is a work in progress and additional techniques and approaches are going to be trialed in future.

If you’re interested in Bluetooth garage door openers be sure to read about using a Bluetooth headset as a garage door opener for your Android device.

Pulling At Threads With The Flipper Zero

July 15, 2025 by 13 Comments

Gone are the days when all smart devices were required an internet uplink. The WiFi-enabled IoT fad, while still upon us (no, my coffee scale doesn’t need to be on the network, dammit!) has begun to give way to low-power protocols actually designed for this kind of communication, such as ZigBee, and more recently, Thread. The downside of these new systems, however, is that they can be a bit more difficult in which to dabble. If you want to see just why your WiFi-enabled toaster uploads 100 MB of data per day to some server, you can capture some network traffic on your laptop without any specialized hardware. These low-power protocols can feel a bit more opaque, but that’s easily remedied with a dev board. For a couple of dollars, you can buy Thread radio that, with some additional hacking, acts as a portal between this previously-arcane protocol and your laptop — or, as [András Tevesz] has shown us, your Flipper Zero.

He’s published a wonderful three-part guide detailing how to mod one such $10 radio to communicate with the Flipper via its GPIO pins, set up a toolchain, build the firmware, and start experimenting. The guide even gets into the nitty-gritty of how data is handled transmitted and investigates potential attack vectors (less worrying for your Thread-enabled light bulb, very worrying for your smart door lock). This project is a fantastic way to prototype new sensors, build complicated systems using the Flipper as a bridge, or even just gain some insight into how the devices in your smart home operate.

In 2025, it’s easier than ever to get started with home automation — whether you cook up a solution yourself, or opt for a stable, off-the-shelf (but still hackable) solution like HomeAssistant (or even Minecraft?). Regardless of the path you choose, you’ll likely wind up with devices on the Thread network that you now have the tools to hack.

Lit up coffee table

Smart Coffee Table To Guide Your Commute

July 13, 2025 by 8 Comments

One of the simple pleasures of life is enjoying a drive to work… only to get stuck in traffic that you could’ve known about if you just checked before your daily commute. Who are we kidding? There’s almost nothing worse. [Michael Rechtin] saw this as a great opportunity to spruce up his living room with something practical, a coffee table that serves as a traffic map of Cincinnati.

The table itself is fairly standard with mitered joints at the corners and coated in polyurethane. Bolt on a few legs, and you’ve got a coffee table. But the fun comes with the fancy design on top. A CNC-cut map of Cincinnati is laid out under a sheet of glass. Roads and rivers are painted for a nice touch.

Of course, none of the woodcraft is what gets the attention. This is where the LED light show comes in. On top of the map resides an animated display of either road conditions or the other five pre-programmed animations. The animations include color-coded highways or the good ole’ gamer RGB. To control all of the topographic goodness, a Raspberry Pi is included with some power regulation underneath the table. Every minute, the Pi is able to grab live traffic data from the cloud to display on top.

A looker, this project shows how our hacking fun can be integrated directly into our everyday life in more subtle ways. When we want to decorate ourselves, however, we might want to turn to more personal fare. Check out this miniature liquid simulation pendant for some more everyday design.

Continue reading “Smart Coffee Table To Guide Your Commute” →

PlayStation Case Mod Hides Gamer Shame

July 11, 2025 by 9 Comments

[Zac] of Zac Builds has a shameful secret: he, a fully grown man, plays video games. Shocking, we know, but such people do exist in our society. After being rightfully laughed out of the family living room, [Zac] relocated his indecent activities to his office, but he knew that was not enough. Someone might enter, might see his secret shame: his PlayStation 5. He decided the only solution was to tear the game console apart, and rebuild it inside of his desk.

All sarcasm aside, it’s hard to argue that [Zac]’s handmade wooden desk doesn’t look better than the stock PS5, even if you’re not one of the people who disliked Sony’s styling this generation. The desk also contains his PC, a project we seem to have somehow missed; the two machines live in adjacent drawers.

While aesthetics are a big motivator behind this case mod, [Zac] also takes the time to improve on Sony’s work: the noisy stock fan is replaced by three silent-running Noctua case fans; the easy-to-confuse power and eject buttons are relocated and differentiated; and the Blu-ray drive gets a proper affordance so he’ll never miss the slot again. An NVMe SSD finishes off the upgrades.

Aside from the woodworking to create the drawer, this project relies mostly on 3D printing for custom mounts and baffles to hold the PS5’s parts and direct airflow where it needs to go. This was made much, much easier for [Zac] via the use of a 3D scanner. If you haven’t used one, this project demonstrates how handy they can be — and also some of the limitations, as the structured-light device (a Creality Raptor) had trouble with the shinier parts of the build. Dealing with that trouble still saved [Zac] a lot of time and effort compared to measuring everything.

While we missed [Zac]’s desk build, we’ve seen his work before: everything from a modernized iPod to wooden sound diffusion panels.

Continue reading “PlayStation Case Mod Hides Gamer Shame” →

A clear acrylic cylinder is shown, inside of which plants are visible. There is mist inside the tube, and LEDs light it from above. A black plastic cap to the tube is visible.

Preserve Your Plants With An Automated Terrarium

June 30, 2025 by 1 Comment

For those of us who aren’t blessed with a green thumb and who are perhaps a bit forgetful, plants can be surprisingly difficult to keep alive. In those cases, some kind of automation, such as [Justin Buchanan]’s Oasis smart terrarium, is a good way to keep our plants from suffering too much.

The Oasis has an ultrasonic mister to water the plants from a built-in tank, LED grow lights, fans to control airflow, and a temperature and humidity sensor. It connects to the local WiFi network and can set up recurring watering and lighting schedules based on network time. Most of the terrarium is 3D-printed, with a section of acrylic tubing providing the clear walls. Before installing the electronics, it’s a good idea to waterproof the printed parts with low-viscosity epoxy, particularly since the water tank is located at the top of the terrarium, where a leak would drip directly onto the control electronics.

Continue reading “Preserve Your Plants With An Automated Terrarium” →

Keep Track Of The Compost With LoRaWAN

June 23, 2025 by 7 Comments

Composting doesn’t seem difficult: pile up organic matter, let it rot. In practice, however, it’s a bit more complicated– if you want that sweet, sweet soil amendment in a reasonable amount of time, and to make sure any food-born pathogens and weed seeds don’t come through, you need a “hot” compost pile. How to tell if the pile is hot? Well, you could go out there and stick your arm in like a schmuck, or you could use [Dirk-WIllem van Gulik]’s “LORAWAN Compostheap solarpowered temperaturesensor” (sic).

The project is exactly what it sounds like, once you add some spaces: a solar-powered temperature sensor that uses LoRaWAN to track temperatures inside (and outside, for comparison) the compost heap year round. Electronically it is pretty simple: a Helltech CubeCell AB01 LoraWAN module is wired up with three DS18B20 temperature sensors, a LiPo battery and a solar panel. (The AB01 has the required circuitry to charge the battery via solar power.) Continue reading “Keep Track Of The Compost With LoRaWAN” →

How A DIY Chicken Coop Door Opener Went From Simple To Complex

June 13, 2025 by 18 Comments

How hard could it be to make a chicken coop door that can be configured to open and close automatically using a straightforward interface? That’s the question that [Jeff Sandberg] set out with, after three years of using a more basic off-the-shelf unit that offered no remote access nor a convenient user interface. The use case for [Jeff] was rather straightforward: the door would be open during the day and closed at night to keep the hens safely inside the coop.

The commercial solution offered an RTC-backed programmable interface as well as a light sensor, but the latter wasn’t always reliable in inclement weather and making simple changes to the programming when e.g. the hens had to stay inside a day due to work on the yard, was much more complicated than needed, plus had to be done on the spot. The new system would solve all these ills.

That said, the existing door mechanism was doing a fine job and could be kept. This just left making a new box with electronics to control it, starting with an ESP32C3 with the ESPHome firmware that is hooked into the local Home Assistant system, along with a motor to lift and lower the door and with magnetic contact sensors.

So far so easy. The hard part came with the installation, which involved trenching to the hen house for mains power, repairing the damage from this, and troubleshooting a power issue that turned out to be due to a dodgy power adapter. The payoff is that now the chicken coop is also part of the smart home and their owner never has to trudge through a soggy garden again to adjust the programming on a dim LC display with far too few buttons.