An infographic showing a tap with a sensor and a flow meter display

2022 Hackaday Prize: Sensible Flow Helps You Keep Track Of Your Water Usage

October 17, 2022 by Robin Kearey 15 Comments

Safe, clean drinking water is a scarce resource that shouldn’t be wasted. But it’s not always easy to see how much you’re using when you turn on the tap: is it one liter a minute? Is it ten? How much do you actually use when washing your hands or brushing your teeth? If you’d like to get some hard data on your water usage, have a look at [Josh EJ]’s Sensible Flow project. It contains designs for a set of sensors that measure your water consumption and a convenient little display that shows the total amount consumed.

The most obvious way of measuring water consumption is to install an off-the-shelf flow meter onto your pipe, which is something that Sensible Flow supports. But probably the most interesting part of the project is a design for a non-invasive flow sensor that you can simply attach to any type of tap. This sensor contains a nine-axis inertial measurement unit (IMU) that detects how far you’ve twisted, turned or tilted the handle, and uses that information to estimate the amount of water flow. You will need to perform an initial calibration step using a timer and measuring cup, but you won’t have to rip open your plumbing just to keep track of your water usage.

Both types of sensors are powered by a coin cell battery that is estimated to work for about one year, thanks to a power-efficient Arduino Pro Mini and a BlueTooth Low Energy (BLE) module to communicate with the base station. The base station plugs into a wall socket and shows the total water consumption on a small one-inch OLED display. STL files for the enclosures are available on the project page, along with detailed circuit diagrams that show how all the parts are connected.

We’ve seen several water flow measurement systems for home use, such as this neat ESP8266-based shower water monitor. If you prefer just a simple visual reminder to turn off the tap, have a look at this LED gadget.

Continue reading “2022 Hackaday Prize: Sensible Flow Helps You Keep Track Of Your Water Usage” →

A Simple Stove, Built For Beans

October 14, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 17 Comments

Sitting around a campfire or fireplace is an aesthetically pleasing experience in most situations, and can even provide some warmth. But unless you have a modern wood-burning appliance, it’s likely that most of the energy available in the biomass is escaping as un-burned vapors. Surprisingly, solving this problem is almost as easy as buying a can of beans at the store, and the result is a very efficient stove which can be used for heat in a pinch.

[Robert] is demonstrating this gasifier stove, not with beans but using both a can of peas and a larger can of potatoes. Various holes are drilled in each can in a specific pattern, and then the smaller pea can is fitted inside the larger potato can. Once a fire is going, the holes allow for air to flow in a way which traps the escaping un-burned vapors from the fuel and burns them as they flow through the contraption. No moving parts are required; this is all powered by the natural airflow that’s produced by the heat of the fire.

The result of a build like this is not only a stove which can extract a much higher percentage of the available fuel, but also quires much less fuel for a given amount of heat, and produces a much cleaner, less smokey fire. [Robert] also added a screen mantle which allows for this to be used more as a heat source, but similar builds can also be used just as effectively for cooking, too.

Continue reading “A Simple Stove, Built For Beans” →

Hackaday Prize 2022: Hedge Watcher Aims To Save Precious Bird Life

October 13, 2022 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

Hedges aren’t just a pretty garden decoration. They’re also a major habitat for many species of insects, birds, and other wildlife. In some areas, a lot of hedge trimming goes during the time that local birds are raising their fledglings, which causes harm at a crucial time. Thus, [Johann Elias Stoetzer] and fellow students were inspired to create Hedge Watcher.

Birds can easily blend in with their surroundings, but thermal cameras are a great way to spot them.

The concept is simple – using thermal vision to spot birds inside a hedge when they may not otherwise be easily visible. Many species blend in with their surroundings in a visual manner, so thermal imaging is a great way to get around this. It can help to avoid destroying nests or otherwise harming birds when trimming back hedges. The idea was sourced from large-scale agricultural operations, which regularly use thermal cameras mounted on drones to look for wildlife before harvesting a field.

However, staring at a thermal camera readout every few seconds while trimming hedges isn’t exactly practical. Instead, the students created an augmented reality (AR) monocular to allow the user to trim hedges at the same time as keeping an eye on the thermal camera feed. Further work involved testing a binocular AR headset, as well as a VR headset. The AR setups proved most useful as they allowed for better situational awareness while working.

It’s a creative solution to protecting the local birdlife, and is to be applauded. There’s plenty of hubris around potential uses for augmented reality, but this is a great example of a real and practical one. And, if you’re keen to experiment with AR yourself, note that it doesn’t have to break the bank either!

PCB-Filled Dream Desk Will Only Get Cooler With Age

October 7, 2022 by Kristina Panos 27 Comments

We all have one. Maybe you’re sitting at it now, or just wishing you were — that perfect desk. You know the one — a place for everything and everything in its place, ample acreage, specialized storage, and top-notch looks. Oh, and blinkenlights. Can’t forget those.

It took four months of hard work, but [Build XYZ]’s dream desk has been finely fabricated into fruition. There’s a lot to unpack with this build, which you can appreciate after the break, but it all started with a donated up/down desk from Progressive Desk. After building the base and putting it through its body weight-driven paces, [Build XYZ] set about making the perfect top, which, as you can see, highlights an assortment of PCBs by encasing them for eternity in resin.

But don’t let your admiration stop there, because the woodworking is just as much a part of the show. In addition to the functional blinkenlights that notify [BuildXYZ] when it’s time to stop working for the day or just take a break, there’s a working wireless charger hiding among the FR4. We can’t wait to look back on this desk in 20 years or so and we also can’t wait to see how PCBs will change over the next 20 years.

This tightly-produced video is a fascinating look into the process of forever immortalizing things in resin. So much resin, in fact, that [Build XYZ] came up a gallon short during the pour and had to wait an excruciatingly long time before more resin showed up. Seeing as how you totally can’t tell at all in the final build, we have maximum respect for [Build XYZ]’s inclusion of this part in the first place, which serves as a warning to the rest of us.

Continue reading “PCB-Filled Dream Desk Will Only Get Cooler With Age” →

Engineers: Be Subversive To Be Green

October 7, 2022 by Jenny List 153 Comments

The caterers for the volunteer workforce behind the summer’s MCH hacker camp in the Netherlands served all-vegan food. This wasn’t the bean sprouts and lentils that maybe some of the more meat-eating readers might imagine when confronted with vegan food, nor was it a half-as-good array of substitutes with leathery soy hamburgers and rubbery fake cheese smelling suspiciously of feet.

Instead it was a well-crafted, interesting, and tasty menu that was something to look forward to after several hours driving a vanload of handwashing sinks. It was in one of their meals that I found food for thought when driving a week later past the huge Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine on my way through Germany to Luxembourg’s Haxogreen as part of my European hacker camp summer tour.

The meal was deep-fried soy protein strips and the mine is probably one of Western Europe’s dirtiest and most problematic CO2 sources in a country that likes to imagine itself as environmentally friendly, so where in this unlikely connection did I find a pairing? Continue reading “Engineers: Be Subversive To Be Green” →

Fermenter on the desk, with the front door opened and some tempeh disks visible inside of it

Hackaday Prize 2022: An Easy-To-Build Fermenter For Tempeh

October 3, 2022 by Arya Voronova 18 Comments

[Maud Bausier] and [Antoine Jaunard] believe we should all know about tempeh — a traditional Indonesian food made out of legumes fermented with fungi. To simplify the process a bit: you get some soybeans, add a tempeh starter fungi culture to them, ferment them a while, and out comes the tempeh. It’s a great source of proteins that’s relatively easy to grow on your own. One catch, though — you do need a certain kind of climate to have it develop properly. This is why [Maud] and [Antoine] are bringing a tempeh fermenter design to this year’s Hackaday Prize.

This fermenter’s controller drives a heating element, which adheres to a pre-programmed fermentation cycle. It also has a fan for airflow and keeping the heat uniform.

The fermenter itself is a small desktop machine with a laser-cut case helped by some CNC-cut and 3D-printed parts, electronics being a simple custom PCB coupling a Pi Pico with widely-available modules. This is clearly a project for someone with access to hackerspace or fab lab resources, but of course, all of the files are on GitHub.

Once built, this design allows you to grow tempeh disks in home conditions on a small scale. It seems the design is mostly finalized, but if you’d like to hear news about this project, they have a blog and a Mastodon feed with some recent updates.

We’ve covered a whole lot of fermentation-related hacks over these years. Most of them have been alcohol-related, but every now and then we see people building fermentation equipment for other food materials, like vinegar, yogurt and sourdough. Now, having seen this fermenter, we’ve learned of one more food hacking direction to explore. This project is one of 10 finalists for our latest Hackaday Prize round, Climate-Resilient Communities. It’s a well-deserved win, and we can’t wait to see where it goes!

Empty Spools Make Useful Tools, Like Counters

September 25, 2022 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

What’s the deal with getting things done? There’s a Seinfeld anecdote that boils down to this: get a calendar, do a thing, and make a big X on each day that you do the thing. Pretty soon, you’ll thirst for chains of Xs, then you’ll want to black out the month. It’s solid advice.

[3D Printy] likes streaks as well, and made several resolutions at the beginning of 2022. As the first of 30 videos to be made throughout the year, they featured this giant 3D printed counting mechanism (video, embedded below) that uses empty filament spools, some 3D prints, and not much else. These are all Hatchbox spools, and it won’t work for every type, but the design should scale up and down to fit other flavors.

This isn’t [3D Printy]’s first counter rodeo — he’s made several more normal-sized ones and perfected a clever carryover mechanism in the process, which is of course open-source. So each spool represents a single digit, and there are printed parts in the core that make the count carry over to the next spool. Whereas the early counters used threaded rod, this giant version rides on 2.5 mm smooth rod, so the spools can slide apart easily. But how does everything stay together? A giant elastic band made of TPU filament, of course — because the answer is always in the room.

Check out the video after the break, and stay for the 900%-sped-up assembly at the end.

Continue reading “Empty Spools Make Useful Tools, Like Counters” →