Resurrecting Dead LED Lightbulbs

December 19, 2017 by Tom Nardi 29 Comments

If you’ve gone down the lighting isle of a store recently, you’ve no doubt noticed we are firmly in the age of the LED light bulb. Incandescent bulbs are kept in small stock for those who still have the odd-ball use case, there’s usually a handful of CFL bulbs for those who don’t mind filling their house with explosive vials of hot mercury, but mostly its all LED now. Which is as it should be: LED lighting is clearly the superior choice in terms of energy efficiency, lifetime, and environmental impact.

Unfortunately, a lot of the LED bulbs you’ll see on the rack are of pretty poor quality. In an effort to drive cost down corners get cut, and bulbs which should run for decades end up blowing after a couple of months. After yet another one failed on him, [Kerry Wong] decided to do a teardown to examine the failure in detail.

He notes that most of the LEDs seem to fail in the same way, flickering after they are switched on until they just stop lighting up entirely. This hints at an overheating issue, and [Kerry] opines that aesthetic and cost considerations have pushed heat dissipation to the back burner in terms of design. It also doesn’t help that many of these bulbs are sitting in insulated recessed fixtures in the ceiling, making it even harder to keep them cool.

Once he separates the actual LEDs from the driver circuitry, he is able to determine that the emitters themselves still work fine. Rather than toss the whole thing in the trash, it’s possible to reuse the LEDs with a new power source, which is quickly demonstrated by showing off a shop light he built from “dead” LED light bulbs.

[Kerry Wong] isn’t the only one to put his LED bulbs under the knife. We’ve covered a number of teardowns which explore the cutting edge of home lighting; for better or for worse.

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Prepping For Power Outages

December 19, 2017 by Jenny List 268 Comments

When the mains power goes, we are abruptly brought face-to-face with how many of the devices and services we take for granted rely upon it. Telephones for instance, where once they were attached to the wall by a cable, now they are a cordless device with a mains-powered base station. Your cellphone can fill that gap, but a modern smartphone with a battery life of under a day is hardly a reliable long-term solution. Meanwhile modern heating systems may still burn gas or fuel oil, but rely on an electric pump for circulation. Your kitchen is full of electrically-powered white goods, your food is preserved by an electric refrigerator, even your gas cooker if you have one will probably expect a mains supply.

When the power goes out we might say that we instantaneously travel back a couple of centuries, but the reality is that our ancestors in 1817 wouldn’t have been in the same mess we are, they had appropriate solutions to surviving a wickedly cold winter when electricity was still something of a gleam in [Michael Faraday]’s eye. In short, they were prepared in a way most of us are not. That’s a shame, so let’s take a closer look sensible modern preparedness.

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The Smartest Air Freshener In The Room

December 16, 2017 by James Hobson 6 Comments

Many automatic air fresheners are wasteful in that they either ceaselessly spritz the room, and manual ones need to be — well — manually operated. This will not do in an era of smart products, so Instructables user [IgorF2] has put together an air freshener that does more than check if you’re around before freshening things up.

The air freshener uses a NodeMCU LoLin and an MG 995 servomotor, with a NeoPixel ring acting as a status light. Be aware — when the servo is triggered there is a significant spike in current, so be sure you aren’t powering the air freshener from a PC USB port or another device. After modeling the air freshener’s case in Fusion 360 — files available here — [IgorF2] wired the components together and mounted them inside the 3D printed case.

Hardware work completed, [IgorF2] has detailed how to set up the Arduino IDE and ESP8266 support for a first-time-user, as well as adding a few libraries to his sketch. A combination of an Adafruit.IO feed and ITTT — once again, showing the setup steps — handles how the air freshener operates: location detection, time specific spritzing, and after tapping a software button on your phone for those particularly lazy moments.

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Will Hack For Espresso

December 13, 2017 by James Hobson 22 Comments

[Avidan Ross] has an unyielding passion for coffee. Brewing a proper espresso is more than measuring fluid ounces, and to that end, his office’s current espresso machine was not making the cut. What’s a maker to do but enlist his skills to brew some high-tech coffee.

For a proper espresso, the mass of the grounds and the brewed output need to be precisely measured. So, the office La Marzocco GS3 has been transformed into a closed-loop espresso machine with a Particle Photon and an Acaia Lunar waterproof scale at its heart.

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Light Switch For The Lazy

December 10, 2017 by James Hobson 39 Comments

[Will Donaldson] has whipped up a quick hack for anyone thinking of dipping their toe into home automation — or otherwise detest flicking off the bedroom light before navigating their way to their bed: a remote control light switch!

This remote switch uses a sg90 servo, an Arduino Uno, and pairs of ATtiny85s with HC-05 Bluetooth modules assembled on protoboards. The 3D printed mount screws easily on top of a standard light switch cover while still allowing the switch to be flipped the old-fashioned way. It’s also perfect as a temporary solution — [Donaldson] is presently renting his apartment — or for those unwilling to mess with the mains power of their abode.

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Finished Dryer Will Text You

December 9, 2017 by Rich Hawkes 35 Comments

Here’s a slightly different way to check on the status of your laundry. Instead of checking if the machine is vibrating, or listening for sound, or pulling everything apart and hacking an ESP8266 into it, check the power that the machine is drawing. This is what [Scrand] did in his IoT dryer build.

The secret behind the hack is the Sonoff POW, a small device that sits in between the wall and the dryer. It has a relay in it that controls it, but, importantly for this hack, it’s able to measure the power consumption used by what’s plugged into it. By installing the ESPurna firmware on it, he can now use all the power of the firmware to control and monitor what’s connected to the POW. He wrote a PowerShell script to monitor the http server now running on the POW checking on how much power is being drawn by the dryer. When that power drops, the laundry is done, and in the case of [Scrand], a text is sent saying so.

When you’re sitting on the couch relaxing, why get up every five minutes to check your laundry when you can have it text you when you know it’s done? Then you can decide whether to get up and deal with it or just leave it until later. The whole reason ESPurna exists to begin with is to check on the status of the laundry. Or, you can go a bit overboard with this laundry room monitor.

Feed Your Cat The Modern Way

December 9, 2017 by Jenny List 17 Comments

Feeding the cat should be a moment of magic, in which you bond with your adorable pet as she rubs seductively against your ankles. As you place the saucer of tender and moist meaty chunks on the floor, she bounds the length of your kitchen, excited expression on her little kitty face, and tail in the air.

If Hackaday made television adverts for cat food, we’d have it nailed. But our everyday reality involves the cute-as-heck Hackaday moggy turning into a persistent little pest when she decides it’s feeding time. [ThinkSilicon]’s friends had exactly this problem, with their furry friend’s preferred timing coming early in the morning. His solution? An automated cat feeder (translated) that dispenses kibbles from a hopper into the lucky mouser’s feeding dish.

The mechanical part of this endeavour is pretty straightforward, a servo moves a sliding piece of plywood with a hole cut in it across the bottom of a hopper full of cat food. Move the slide, dispense food down a chute to the waiting happy cat. Behind the scenes is an ESP8266 and a NodeMCU web service, through which feeding time can be either scheduled, or dispensed at will.

A happy cat means a happy owner, especially in the very early morning. Until that is the newly-sated creature decides to spread the love, jumping onto the owner’s bed in thanks and breathing cat-food-breath into their face. You really do have to love ’em!

We’ve shown you many cat food related projects in the past, including this Arduino take on the same idea. But why take the effort to trigger it yourself, when the cat can do it for you.