A New, Smarter Universal Remote

May 6, 2025 by Matthew Carlson 3 Comments

The remote for [Dillan Stock]’s TV broke, so he built a remote. Not just as a replacement but as something new. For some of us, there was a glorious time in the early 2000s when a smart remote was needed and there were options you could buy off the shelf. Just one handy button next to the screen had a macro programmed that would turn on the receiver, DVD player, and TV, and then configure it with the right inputs. However, the march of technological convenience has continued and nowadays soundbars turn on just in time and the TV auto switches the input. Many devices are (for better or worse) connected to WiFi, allowing all sorts of automation.

[Dillan] was lucky enough that his devices were connected to his home assistant setup. So this remote is an ESP32 running ESPHome. These automations could be triggered by your phone or via voice assistant. What is more interesting is watching [Dillan] go through the design process. Deciding what buttons there should be, where they should be placed, and how the case would snap together takes real effort. The design uses all through-hole components except for the ESP32 which is a module.

This isn’t the first thing [Dillan] has made with an ESP32, as he previously revamped a non-standard smart lamp with the versatile dev board. The 3d printable files for the remote are free available. Video after the break.

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3D Printed Downspout Makes Life Just A Little Nicer

May 5, 2025 by Tyler August 11 Comments

Sometimes, a hack solves a big problem. Sometimes, it’s just to deal with something that kind of bugs you. This hack from [Dillan Stock] is in the latter category, replacing an ugly, redundant downspout with an elegant 3D printed pipe.

As [Dillan] so introspectively notes, this was not something that absolutely required a 3D print, but “when all you have a hammer, everything is a nail, and 3D printing is [his] hammer.” We can respect that, especially when he hammers out such a lovely print.

By modeling this section of his house in Fusion 360, he could produce an elegantly swooping loft to combine the outflow into one downspout. Of course the assembly was too big to print at once, but any plumber will tell you that ABS welds are waterproof. Paint and primer gets it to match the house and hopefully hold up to the punishing Australian sun.

The video, embedded below, is a good watch and a reminder than not every project has to be some grand accomplishment. Sometimes, it can be as simple as keeping you from getting annoyed when you step into your backyard.

We’ve seen rainwater collection hacks before; some of them a lot less orthodox. Of course when printing with ABS like this, one should always keep in mind the ever-escalating safety concerns with the material.

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Tablet Suspension System Avoids Fatigue At Bedtime

May 3, 2025 by Seth Mabbott 12 Comments

You know how it is. You’re all cozy in bed but not quite ready to doze off. You’re reading Hackaday (Hackaday is your go-to bedtime reading material, right?) or you’re binge-watching your latest reality TV obsession on your tablet. You feel the tablet growing heavier and heavier as your arms fatigue from holding it inches above your face. You consider the embarrassment you’ll endure from explaining how you injured your nose as the danger of dropping the tablet gradually increases. The struggle is real.

[Will Dana] has been engineering his way out of this predicament for a few years now, and with the recent upgrade to his iPad suspension system he is maximizing his laziness, but not without putting in a fair amount of hard work first.

The first iteration of the device worked on a manual pulley system whereby an iPad was suspended from the ceiling over his bed on three cords. Pulling on a cord beside the bed would raise the bracket used for holding the iPad out of the way while not in use. This new iteration takes that pesky cord pulling out of the user’s hands, replacing it with a motorized winch. A spot of dark ink on one of the cords in combination with a light sensor helps to calibrate the system so that the ESP32 which controls it always knows the proper limits of operation.

Of course, if, like [Will], you’re using an ESP32, and your room is already fully controlled by a voice interface, you may as well integrate the two. After all, there is no sense in wasting precious energy by pressing buttons. Utter a simple command to Alexa once you’re tucked in, and it’s time for hands-free entertainment.

We’ve covered several of [Will]’s previous creations, such as his Motorized Relay Computer and Harry Potter-inspired Sorting Hat.

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Presence Detection Augments 1930s Home

April 18, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 18 Comments

It can be jarring to see various sensors, smart switches, cameras, and other technology in a house built in the 1930s, like [Chris]’s was. But he still wanted presence detection so as to not stub any toes in the dark. The result is a sensor that blends in with the home’s aesthetics a bit better than anything you’re likely to find at the Big Box electronics store.

For the presence detection sensors, [Chris] chose to go with 24 GHz mmwave radar modules that, unlike infrared sensors, can detect if a human is in an area even if they are incredibly still. Paired with the diminutive ESP32-S2 Mini, each pair takes up very little real estate on a wall.

Although he doesn’t have a 3D printer to really pare down the size of the enclosure to the maximum, he found pre-made enclosures instead that are fairly inconspicuous on the wall. Another design goal here was to make sure that everything was powered so he wouldn’t have to perpetually change batteries, so a small wire leads from the prototype unit as well.

The radar module and ESP pair are set up with some code to get them running in Home Assistant, which [Chris] has provided on the project’s page. With everything up and running he has a module that can control lights without completely changing the aesthetic or behavior of his home. If you’re still using other presence sensors and are new to millimeter wave radar, take a look at this project for a good guide on getting started with this fairly new technology.

Binner Makes Workshop Parts Organization Easy

April 16, 2025 by Matt Varian 29 Comments

We’ve all had times where we knew we had some part but we had to go searching for it all over as it wasn’t where we thought we put it. Organizing the numerous components, parts, and supplies that go into your projects can be a daunting task, especially if you use the same type of part at different times for different projects. It helps to have a framework to keep track of all the small details. Binner is an open source project that aims to allow you to easily maintain a database that can be customized to your use.

In a recent video for DigiKey, [Byte Sized Engineer] used Binner to track the locations of his components and parts in his freshly organized workshop. Binner already has the ability to read the labels used by well-known electronics suppliers via a barcode scanner, and uses that information to populate your inventory. It even grabs quantities and links in a datasheet for your newly added part. The barcode scanner can also be used to retrieve the contents of a location, so with a single scan Binner can bring up everything residing at that location.

Binner can be run locally so there isn’t the concern of putting in all the effort to build up your database just to have an internet outage make it inaccessible. Another cool feature is that it allows you to print labels, you can customize the fields to display the values you care about.

The project already has future plans to tie into a “smart bin” system to light up the location of your component — a clever feature we’ve seen implemented in previous setups.

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Monitor Your Smart Plugs On The Command Line

April 2, 2025 by Jenny List 4 Comments

The plethora of smart home devices available today deliver all manner of opportunities, but it’s fair to say that interfacing with them is more often done in the browser or an app than in the terminal. WattWise from [Naveen Kulandaivelu] is a tool which changes all that, it’s a command-line interface (CLI) for power monitoring smart plugs.

Written in Python, the tool can talk either directly to TP-Link branded smart plugs, or via Home Assistant. It tracks the power consumption with a simple graph, but the exciting part lies in how it can be used to throttle the CPU of a computer in order to use power at the points in the day when it is cheapest. You can find the code in a GitHub repository.

We like the idea of using smart plugs as instruments, even if they may not be the most accurate of measurement tools. It takes them even further beyond the simple functionality and walled-garden interfaces provided by their manufacturers, which in our view can only be a good thing.

Meanwhile, for further reading we’ve looked at smart plugs in detail in the past.

Open Source Framework Aims To Keep Tidbyt Afloat

March 29, 2025 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

We recently got a note in the tips line from [Tavis Gustafson], who is one of the developers of Tronbyt — a replacement firmware and self-hosted backend that breaks the Tidbyt smart display free from its cloud dependency. When they started the project, [Tavis] says the intent was simply to let privacy-minded users keep their data within the local network, which was itself a goal worthy enough to be featured on these pages.

But now that Tidbyt has been acquired by Modal and has announced they’ll no longer be producing new units, things have shifted slightly. While the press release says that the Tidbyt backend is going to stay up and running for existing customers, the writing is clearly on the wall. It’s now possible that the Tronbyt project will be able to keep these devices from ending up in landfills when the cloud service is inevitably switched off, especially if they can get the word out to existing users before then.

What’s that? You say you haven’t heard of Tidbyt? Well, truth be told, neither had we. So we did some digging, and this is where things get really interesting.

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