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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.

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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.

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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.

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Keep Track Of The Compost With LoRaWAN

June 23, 2025 by 8 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.

Cat at the door

2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Cat At The Door

June 12, 2025 by 14 Comments

This Pet Hacks Contest entry from [Andrea] opens the door to a great collaboration of sensors to solve a problem. The Cat At The Door project’s name is a bit of a giveaway to its purpose, but this project has something for everyone, from radar to e-ink, LoRa to 3D printing. He wanted a sensor to watch the door his cats frequent and when one of his cats were detected have an alert sent to where he is in the house

There are several ways you can detect a cat, in this project [Andrea] went with mmWave radar, and this is ideal for sensing a cat as it allows the sensor to sit protected inside, it works day or night, and it doesn’t stop working should the cat stand still. In his project log he has a chapter going into what he did to dial in the settings on the LD2410C radar board.

How do you know if you’re detecting your cat, some other cat, a large squirrel, or a small child? It helps if you first give your cats a MAC address, in the form of a BLE tag. Once the radar detects presence of a suspected cat, the ESP32-S3 starts looking over Bluetooth, and if a known tag is found it will identify which cat or cats are outside waiting.

Once the known cat has been identified, it’s time to notify [Andrea] that his cat is waiting for his door opening abilities. To do this he selected an ESP32 board that includes a SX1262 LoRa module for communicating with the portable notification device. This battery powered device has a low power e-paper display showing you which cat, as well as an audio buzzer to help alert you.

To read more details about this project head over to the GitHub page to check out all the details. Including a very impressive 80 page step-by-step guide showing you step by step how to make your own. Also, be sure to check out the other entries into the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest.

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Piano Doorbell Adds Music To Your Home

June 8, 2025 by 16 Comments

Regular ding-dong doorbells are fun and all, but it can be nice to put something a little more special by your front door. To that end, [Arpan Mondal] built this neat little piano doorbell to make visiting his home just a touch more fun.

The heart of the build is an ESP32 microcontroller. It’s responsible for reading the state of five 3D printed piano keys: three white, two black. It’s nowhere near a full octave, but for a doorbell, it’s enough. When a key is pressed, the ESP32 plays a short audio sample embedded within the program code itself. This is done with the help of a PAM8403 audio amplifier module, which jacks up the output to drive the doorbell speaker loud enough to be heard throughout the home. It’s not exactly studio quality audio, but for a doorbell, it sounds pretty solid.

If you’re looking for a fun and easy build to make your home just a little bit more whimsical, it’s hard to beat something like this. Your musical friends will love it—they might even develop an intro riff of their very own. We’ve featured some other fun doorbell builds before, too—the best of which are the Halloween projects.
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