Virtual Yule Log Brings Old Tradition To The Web

December 15, 2022 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

Yule Log broadcasts are a bit of an American tradition, though similar content has also been broadcast around the world. They consist of a video of a log burning in a fireplace, ideally merrily so, and often feature Christmas carols or other holiday songs to help create a festive mood. [Joshua Gross] wanted to bring that tradition up to date, and thus built a Yule Log website with the help of some creative technologists.

WebYuleLog.com, as the project is known, features several web-based recreations of the Yule Log concept. They are charming little creations built with different techniques, from the AI-generated to those hewn from simple, pure HTML and CSS. They range from cute 8-bit-esque tributes to burning firewood, to the ethereal and unrecognizable thought bubbles of an image-generating neural network. We’re pretty sure one of them is a oblique reference to an old Excel 97 Easter Egg, too.

It’s funny how much can be achieved within a modern browser window. Once upon a time, you were lucky to get a few GIFs and an obnoxious looping MIDI soundtrack.

A 3D printed cat treat dispenser on a table with a laptop in the background and with a treat in it's tray and a cat on the left about to eat the treat.

Local IOT Cat Treat Dispenser

November 22, 2022 by Abe Connelly 9 Comments

[MostElectronics], like many of us, loves cats, and so wanted to make an internet connected treat dispenser for their most beloved. The result is an ingenious 3D printed mechanism connected to a Raspberry Pi that’s able to serve treats through a locally run web application.

From the software side, the Raspberry Pi uses a RESTful API that one can connect to through a static IP. The API is implemented as a Python Flask application running under a stand alone web server Python script. The web application itself keeps track of the number of treats left and provides a simple interface to dispense treats at the operators leisure. The RpiMotorLib Python library is used to control a 28BYJ-48 stepper motor through its ULN2003 controller module, which is used to rotate the inside shaft of the treat dispenser.

The mechanism to dispense treats is a stacked, compartmentalized drum, with two drum layers for food compartments that turn to drop treats. The bottom drum dispenses treats through a chute connected to the tray for the cat, leaving an empty compartment that the top drum can replenish by dropping its treats into through a staggered opening. Each compartmentalized treat drum layer provides 11 treats, allowing for a total of 22 treats with two layers stacked on top of each other. One could imagine extending the treat dispenser to include more drum layers by adding even more layers.

Source code is available on GitHub and the STL files for the dispenser are available on Thingiverse. We’ve seen cat electronic feeders before, sometimes with escalating consequences that shake us to our core and leave us questioning our superiority.

Video after the break!

Continue reading “Local IOT Cat Treat Dispenser” →

The demo toot screenshot, showing a text-only message sent from the ESP32 using the library.

Moved Off Twitter? Make Your ESP32 Toot

November 9, 2022 by Arya Voronova 75 Comments

Since Twitter was officially taken over by Elon Musk a few days ago, there’s been significant staff cuts, a stream of questionable decisions, and uncertainty about the social media platform’s future. So it’s little surprise that a notable number of people, those in the tech and hacker scenes in particular, have decided to move over to (or at least bridge their accounts with) the distributed and open source Mastodon service.

Of course, the hacks would follow closely, and [Toby] shares a simple ESP32-based Mastodon client library for us to start with. Instead of “tweets”, messages on Mastodon instances are called “toots”, in line with the platform’s mammoth-like mascot. The library, called Luyba, is able to send toots and includes a demo firmware. Built using C++ and with support for Platform.IO, it should fit into quite a few projects out there, letting you easily send toots to whichever instance you find your home, as the library-aided demo toot shows.

What could you do with such a library on your MCU? Turns out, quite a few fun things – a home automation interface, a critter trap, an online BBC Basic interpreter, or, given image support, a camera that tweets whatever it’s pointed at. There’s quite a bit of fun hackers can have given a micro-blogging service API access and a bit of code that works with it. That said, for all the good that Twitter brought us over the years, there’s a lot that Mastodon can easily do better, between easily game-able “Trending” sidebar, bias found in auto-cropping algorithms and disarrayed internal security policies.

Infrastructure diagram of [Stefan]'s network at the end of his fiber optics journey

Say No To Obsolescence, Wire Up Your House With Fiber

November 3, 2022 by Arya Voronova 105 Comments

These days, if you wire your house with anything less than gigabit, you might end up throttling your Internet connection. If you wired things up using two pairs per device back in 100BASE-T days, however, you’ll want to redo your cabling before you buy new switches. Now, some of us are already starting to equip ourselves with 2.5G hardware — which may require new cabling once again. Would you like to opt out of the Ethernet cabling upgrade rat race, at least for a while? Do like [Stefan Schüller] did, and use fiber optics for your home networking needs!

[Stefan] walks you through everything you’d need to know if you ever choose to look into fiber for your networking needs, and explains the design decisions he’s made — from splicing fiber optics himself, to building a PC to do routing instead of getting a hardware Small Form-factor Pluggable (SFP) equipped router. He also describes pitfalls, like SFP modules requiring reconfiguration to work with different router brands, and having to buy a fiber splicer with an eye-watering pricetag.

In the end, he shows a cost breakdown, and says he’s quite happy with the upgrade. While the costs might seem prohibitive compared to running Ethernet, upgrading to fiber will have your equipment function at top speed whenever you need it – who knows, perhaps in a few years time, 2.5G will no longer suffice for new advancements in home technology needs, and we’ll see more SFP modules in hackers’ hands. After all, modern TVs already use fiber optics for video data transfer.

Continue reading “Say No To Obsolescence, Wire Up Your House With Fiber” →

Slap This Big Red Button For An Instant Social Media Detox

September 30, 2022 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

Dangerous machines, like ones that can quickly reduce you to a fine red mist or a smoking cinder, tend to have a Big Red Button™ to immediately stop whatever the threat is. Well, if a more dangerous machine than social media has ever been invented, we’re not sure what it would be, which is why we’re glad this social media kill switch exists.

The idea behind [Gunter Froman]’s creation is to provide a physical interface to SocialsDetox, a service that blocks or throttles connectivity to certain apps and websites. SocialDetox blocks access using either DNS over HTTPS (DoH) or, for particularly pesky and addictive apps, a service-specific VPN. The service does require a subscription, the cost of which varies by the number of devices you want to protect, but the charges honestly seem pretty reasonable.

While SocialsDetox can be set up to block access on a regular schedule, say if you want to make the family dinner a social-free time, there may be occasions where killing social access needs to happen right now. This is where the Big Red Button comes into it, which is attached to a Wemos D1 Mini. Pressing the kill switch sends an API request to either enable or disable the service, giving you a likely much-needed break from the swirling vortex of hate and envy that we all can’t seem to live without. Except for Hackaday, of course — it’s totally not like that here.

The irony of using an IoT appliance to restrict access to social media is not lost on us, but you work with the tools you’ve got. And besides, we like the physical interface here, which sort of reminds us this fitting enclosure for a PiHole.

Bufferbloat, The Internet, And How To Fix It

August 18, 2022 by Jonathan Bennett 48 Comments

There’s a dreaded disease that’s plagued Internet Service Providers for years. OK, there’s probably several diseases, but today we’re talking about bufferbloat. What it is, how to test for it, and finally what you can do about it. Oh, and a huge shout-out to all the folks working on this problem. Many programmers and engineers, like Vint Cerf, Dave Taht, Jim Gettys, and many more have cracked this nut for our collective benefit.

When your computer sends a TCP/IP packet to another host on the Internet, that packet routes through your computer, through the network card, through a switch, through your router, through an ISP modem, through a couple ISP routers, and then finally through some very large routers on its way to the datacenter. Or maybe through that convoluted chain of devices in reverse, to arrive at another desktop. It’s amazing that the whole thing works at all, really. Each of those hops represents another place for things to go wrong. And if something really goes wrong, you know it right away. Pages suddenly won’t load. Your VoIP calls get cut off, or have drop-outs. It’s pretty easy to spot a broken connection, even if finding and fixing it isn’t so trivial.

That’s an obvious problem. What if you have a non-obvious problem? Sites load, but just a little slower than it seems like they used to. You know how to use a command line, so you try a ping test. Huh, 15.0 ms off to Google.com. Let it run for a hundred packets, and essentially no packet loss. But something’s just not right. When someone else is streaming a movie, or a machine is pushing a backup up to a remote server, it all falls apart. That’s bufferbloat, and it’s actually really easy to do a simple test to detect it. Run a speed test, and run a ping test while your connection is being saturated. If your latency under load goes through the roof, you likely have bufferbloat. There are even a few of the big speed test sites that now offer bufferbloat tests. But first, some history. Continue reading “Bufferbloat, The Internet, And How To Fix It” →

A Simple Streaming Radio Receiver

August 14, 2022 by Jenny List 12 Comments

For those interested in a career in broadcast radio there aren’t many routes into the business. Student radio, pirate radio, and hospital radio usually feature somewhere near the start of any DJ’s resumé. Hospital radio stations often don’t have a transmission license and have historically relied on wired systems, but since those can’t reach everywhere they are now more likely to look to the Internet. [AllanGallop] has created the Mini Web Radio for the hospital station in the British city of Milton Keynes, a compact battery-powered single station streaming radio receiver that can pick up those tunes anywhere with a wireless network connection.

Inside the neatly designed 3D printed box the hardware is quite straightforward, a WeMos ESP32 board and a MAX98357A I2S digital amplifier module all powered by an 18650 cell. There’s a volume control and headphone socket, which is all that’s needed for the user interface. The software has code for both Arduino and Platform.io and is configured as you might expect through a web interface. Everything can be found in a handy GitHub repository should you wish to build one yourself. Meanwhile, it’s particularly pleasing as a Hackaday scribe to feature a project with roots in one’s own hackerspace, in this case, Milton Keynes Makerspace.

Thanks [Cid] for the tip!