This Simple Media Player Will Inspire Beginners And Invite Experimentation

August 16, 2022 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

While it would have been considered science-fiction just a few decades ago, the ability to watch virtually any movie or TV show on a little slab that fits in your pocket is today no big deal. But for an electronics beginner, being able to put together a pocketable video player like this one would be quite exciting, and might even serve as a gateway into the larger world of electronics design.

For inspiration, [Alex] from Super Make Something on YouTube looked to the Rickrolling keychain media players we featured back in January. His player is quite a bit larger and more capable, with a PCB design that allows the player to be built in multiple configurations, from audio-only to full video and a LiPo battery. The guts of the player center around an ESP32 module, with an audio amp and speakers plus a 1.8″ LCD screen with SD card reader for storing media files. Add in a few controls and switches and a little code, and you’ll be playing back media files in a snap. Build info and demo in the video below.

It may be a simple design, but we feel like that’s the whole point. [Alex] has taken pains to make this as approachable a build as possible. All the parts are cheap and easily available, and the skills needed to put it together are minimal — with the possible exception of soldering down the ESP32 module, which lacks castellated edge terminals. For a beginner, getting a usable media player by mixing together just a few modules would be magical, and the fact that it’s still pretty hackable afterward is just icing on the cake.

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Discreet CO2 Monitor Hides Elegant Internal Layout

August 16, 2022 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

Outwardly, this sleek CO2 monitor designed by [Daniel Gernert] might look like something cooked up in Amazon’s consumer electronics division. But open up that 3D printed case, and you’ll find a surprisingly low parts count that’s been cleverly packed in so as to make the most of the enclosure’s meager internal dimensions.

There are, if you can believe it, just three principle components to this device: a Seeed Studio Seeeduino XIAO microcontroller, a Infineon S2GO PAS CO2 sensor board, and a ring of WS2812B LEDs. You could even delete the ring altogether and replace it with a single addressable LED to accomplish the same goal, but we’d say the full ring is money-well-spent if you’re going to spin up your own copy.

Functionality is very straightforward — the LED ring will indicate the detected CO2 concentration by lighting up green and working its way through yellow and onto red. The sensor has no wireless capability, but if you plug it into your computer, you can get a local readout of current conditions.

We love environmental monitoring solutions here almost as much as we love intricately designed 3D printed enclosures. If you’d like to see another project where those two concepts aligned, check out this printable ESP8266 sensor enclosure.

Haptic Baby Monitor Gets The Wearer’s Attention

August 11, 2022 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

Anyone who’s ever slept through a morning’s alarm can tell you that sounds, even loud piercing ones, don’t always wake a person out of a deep sleep. Similarly, hearing a baby cry on the other side of the monitor might not always wake a parent up in the middle of the night. So what’s the solution? This haptic baby monitor created by [Guy Dupont] certainly looks like it has some promise.

[Guy] picked up a fairly standard baby monitor from VTech and popped it open to see how he could tie a vibration motor into the original circuitry. He originally thought he’d have to do some signal processing magic to figure out the amplitude of the audio, but then he realized that the five LEDs on the front of the unit that light up to indicate the audio level were already doing the hard work for him.

Detecting audio level by reading the status of the LEDs.

So he wired each of the LEDs up to the pins of a Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 microcontroller, and wrote some code that would poll their status a few hundred times per second. Dividing the total number of LEDs by the count of how many are currently illuminated gives him a nice average that he can use to set the intensity of the vibration motor that he’s built into a stretchy armband.

For extra points, [Guy] is also using the Bluetooth capability of the XIAO to provide a rudimentary configuration service — just connect up to the MCU with a Bluetooth serial application on your computer or phone, and fire off a value between 0 and 10 to augment the motor’s intensity. There’s also a BLE characteristic which can be read from a client device to determine the currently detected audio amplitude, which could be used to chart how well the baby is sleeping over time. Alternately, as demonstrated at the end of the video, you could use it to play Flappy Bird.

It’s an elegant modification that could potentially hold promise for parent’s who need a bit of extra help keeping tabs on their miniature humans. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen hackers try to improve upon the classic baby monitor, but this is arguably the most approachable attempt we’ve seen to date.

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screenshot from the video linked, showing example code that lights up an LED, and in a small window, also shows the LED lit up on a small Pi Pico board connected over USB

Your MicroPython Board Can Be Your Tinkering Peripheral

August 10, 2022 by Arya Voronova 18 Comments

[Brian Pugh] has shared a cool new project that simultaneously runs on desktop Python and MicroPython – the Belay library. This library lets you control a MicroPython device seamlessly from your Python code – interacting with real-world things like analog/digital trinkets, servos, Neopixels and displays, without having to create your own firmware or APIs.

You need a serial-connected MicroPython board – even an ESP8266 should do. Then, you can intersperse your Python code with MicroPython-written functions, and call them whenever you need your connected device to do something – keeping the entire logic of your project within a single device. [Brian] provides quite a few examples, even for more complex things like displays. No doubt, there are limitations, but this looks to be a powerful tool in a hacker’s arsenal.

Readers might be reminded of an Arduino library called Firmata – an old-time way to do such connectivity. We’ve also previously covered a Pi Pico firmware that does a similar thing, and even features a breakout board for all your experimentation needs!
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A Merciless Environmental Monitoring System

August 10, 2022 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

We’ve seen plenty of environmental monitoring setups here on Hackaday — wireless sensors dotted around the house, all uploading their temperature and humidity data to a central server hidden away in some closet. The system put together by [Andy] from Workshopshed is much the same, except this time the server has been designed to be as bright and bold as possible.

The use of Mosquitto, InfluxDB, Node Red, and Grafana (M.I.N.G) made [Andy] think of Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon, which in turn inspired the enclosure that holds the Raspberry Pi, hard drive, and power supply. Some 3D printed details help sell the look, and painted metal mesh panels make sure there’s plenty of airflow.

While the server is certainly eye-catching, the sensors themselves are also worth a close look. You might expect the sensors to be based on some member of the ESP family, but in this case, [Andy] has opted to go with the Raspberry Pi Pico. As this project pre-dates the release of the wireless variant of the board, he had to add on an ESP-01 for communications as well as the DTH11 temperature and humidity sensor.

For power each sensor includes a 1200 mAh pouch cell and a Pimoroni LiPo SHIM, though he does note working with the Pico’s energy saving modes posed something of a challenge. A perfboard holds all the components together, and the whole thing fits into an understated 3D printed enclosure.

Should you go the ESP8266/ESP32 route for your wireless sensors, we’ve seen some pretty tidy packages that are worth checking out. Or if you’d rather use something off-the-shelf, we’re big fans of the custom firmware developed for Xiaomi Bluetooth thermometers.

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PC Hardware Monitor Uses Tricorder-Derived Tech

August 8, 2022 by Tom Nardi 17 Comments

The visually striking hardware monitor that [Mangy_Dog] recently put together for his new custom PC build might look like something out of the Alien franchise, but the hardware he’s built it around actually comes from a very different science-fiction property: Star Trek. Or at least, from a very impressive line of Star Trek props, anyway.

Given the incredible amount of time and effort that [Mangy_Dog] has put into developing his Star Trek: Voyager tricorder, it’s no surprise that he would decide to reuse its graphics chip and microcontroller. But while the familiar hardware might have helped jump-start this build, this was no weekend project.

He’s steadily been working on it for several months now, and even entered it into the 2022 Sci-Fi Contest back in April. Obviously he wasn’t able to complete it before the Contest deadline, but looking at the final results, we’re happy to see he kept chugging away at it.

Of course, with a project like this, the hardware is only half the battle. In the video below, [Mangy_Dog] explains the challenges involved in creating not only the firmware that runs on the monitor, but the accompanying PC-side application. This included modifying existing libraries to add support for the device’s unique flash storage arrangement, and pulling the relevant system status information out of the operating system and into a series of customizable widgets.

As impressive as the project is, [Mangy_Dog] says he’s not done yet. A second revision of the hardware and software will address several issues and add new capabilities, and considering the high degree of polish we’ve come to expect from his creations, we’re not surprised

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ESP32 Powers Covert Pentesting Device

August 5, 2022 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

Looking to expand their hardware design experience, [mentalburden] recently put together a low-cost handheld gadget that can be used for various security-related tasks such as logging WiFi traffic, operating as a dead drop, and performing deauthentication attacks.

The custom PCB plays host to the essentials — an ESP32-S microcontroller, AMS1117 3.3 V regulator, a SSD1306 OLED, and a couple of buttons. This lets the user navigate through a simple menu system and select whatever function they wish to enable. During testing, a pair of 18650 cells kept the electronics running for an impressive 22 hours.

A second version of the PCB fixed a few bodges that were required to get the original prototype working, and given how energy efficient the hardware ended up being, [mentalburden] decided to drop the power supply down to a single 18650 for a total runtime of around 15 hours. A 3D printed case and some silicone buttons, produced with a simple clay mold, completed the package.

There’s still some improvements that could be made, namely integrating a battery charging circuit into the PCB and switching over to USB-C, but overall its a solid prototype with an impressive per-unit cost of less than $10 USD. Though if you’re looking for something even cheaper, we’ve seen an even more simplistic approach based on the ESP-01.