A Cheap And Easy Control Screen For Home Assistant

September 16, 2026 by 17 Comments

Home Assistant is a great way to rig up and manage your smart home and its many and varied devices. You can of course control the system from your smartphone or a computer, but you might like to have a dedicated interface too. In that regard, [Max Gramser]’s project may come in handy.

At heart, it’s a Home Assistant control screen that you can lay out yourself. It’s intended to run on ESP32 hardware. Most specifically, it’s built to run on the Cheap Yellow Display which combines an ILI9341 display with an XPT2046 resistive touchscreen, or a Guition ESP32-S3-4848S040, which has a ST7701S RGB display combined with a capacitive GT911 touchscreen. You merely need to load the firmware on to one of these units, and you’ll have a configurable and customizable touchscreen interface for your own Home Assistant setup.

The GUI used is clean, attractive, and flexible. You can have it display weather, time, and date widgets, populate the screen with buttons for activating lights and appliances, or even command a compatible robot vacuum. Whatever you might want to do with Home Assistant, you can almost certainly create a quick control for it on the display so it’s always on the wall, ready to go when you need it.

If you’ve always dreamed of your house having a futuristic control panel like we used to dream of in the 1980s, well… now it’s a reality. You just need to drop a few bucks on a touchscreen ESP32 rig and you’re ready to go. There’s plenty more you can do with a Cheap Yellow Display, too, so don’t hesitate to check out some of the previous builds we’ve featured with it!

Heat Domes: Meet The Quiet And Oppressive Take On The Thunderdome

September 16, 2026 by 38 Comments

One of the nice things about the weather is that even if it’s bad right now, it’ll definitely be changing soon and maybe even for the better. There is one exception to this rule, however, and that comes in the form of heat domes, which are weather systems whereby a region of air becomes isolated from the surrounding systems. This creates effectively a greenhouse, with hot air remaining trapped and moisture unable to get in.

Although until recently not very common, this weather phenomenon poses a major challenge to any flora and fauna that finds itself trapped in a heat dome. With nights being about as hot and stifling as the days with their blue skies unbroken by any cloud cover and no rain for potentially weeks on end, it poses severe hydration, cardiovascular, and other challenges to any affected lifeforms.

Continue reading “Heat Domes: Meet The Quiet And Oppressive Take On The Thunderdome” →

Full-Color Looks Great On 3D Printed Sliding Puzzles

September 16, 2026 by 4 Comments

[Angus] of [Maker’s Muse] shows off both a parametric, print-in-place sliding puzzle design he created, and the results of UV printing full-color designs on the same. The results look beautiful, and there was a whole lot of trial and error involved in the process.

The design includes a pop-out tile, which can be re-inserted to a finished puzzle.

Creating a good print-in-place sliding puzzle depends a lot on tolerances. Today’s 3D printers are much more capable in this regard than they were ten or so years ago, but getting the right feel to the pieces was still a long learning process. It’s not at all easy to get all the different characteristics in the right balance. On one hand, if the pieces are too tight they won’t slide easily. But if they are too loose, the puzzle can bind because the pieces have too much play. It may also flex enough to pop apart. And of course, the shape of the pieces and their mating surfaces are constrained to angles and shapes that 3D print reliably. [Angus] persevered and succeeded, and shows off everything from cute 3 x 3 units to a massive scaled-up 11 x 11 puzzle, printed on his Prusa XL.

Getting the color onto the print is the work of a desktop UV ink printer, the same model our own Tom Nardi had a hands-on look at last year. [Angus] shows how printing a single color image onto the puzzle is pretty easy and looks great, but what’s even better is a textured relief image with some real tactile depth to it. Expect a lot more work to do for that, because thick layers of ink gum the puzzle up with overspray unless one avoids printing over the gaps in the tiles.

Watch both the puzzles and the color printing in action in his video, embedded just below.

Continue reading “Full-Color Looks Great On 3D Printed Sliding Puzzles” →

Round AMOLED Badge Does All Kinds Of Cool Stuff

September 16, 2026 by 5 Comments

[curisama] has put together a project simply entitled The Badge. It’s simple enough, being a little round screen that you wear. Only, it does a wide variety of rather interesting things.

The build is based on the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-1.75C. It’s not a very fun part number, but it describes a device which combines a 466×466 round display with a milled aluminium case and an ESP32-S3 to drive everything.

Neat, right?

[curisama] started building a custom firmware for the device, intending to use it as an air mouse. Soon enough it had a touchpad, too, a bunch of extra keys, as well as a clock and some games. It was given the ability to record audio too, up to 52 minutes in WAV format. From there, it also gained a rather fetching liquid simulation, with water sloshing around the round display with a little boat riding around on it. This took some optimization, with [curisama] pushing the animation from 3 FPS all the way up to 18 fps, making it much more fluid and satisfying to watch. There were other optimizations too, with [curisama] figuring out how enabling the CONFIG_PM_ENABLE flag and some other tweaks could push standby battery life from 11.9 to 19.6 hours. Not a bad gain at all.

If you need a handy yet unassuming round object to act as a human interface device and some other stuff besides, consider buying the Waveshare part and flashing it yourself. You can do so right from your browser. We’ve featured plenty of other interesting projects with Waveshare parts in recent years, too. The integrated-display-and-microcontroller market is booming for makers right now, and it’s one we’ll continue to follow with interest. If you’re doing innovative stuff in this space, be sure to notify the tipsline!

A Super-Accurate Clock Using A Tiny Microcontroller

September 15, 2026 by 27 Comments

DCF77 is a German VLF transmitting station that broadcasts a time signal across Europe on 77.5 kHz. Thus a common sight in a European home is a clock emblazoned with the words “Radio controlled”. With the timing broadcast in a simple and low speed digital format it doesn’t require the greatest of hardware to decode, and a small microcontroller can handle the task with ease. And there are few smaller than an ATtiny as used in [kwolf1909]’s decoder. It takes a DCF77 bitstream from a receiver, and shows the time on an I2C display.

The receiver isn’t part of this project, however a single-frequency longwave receiver is not a difficult thing to build. The interface is a push-button, for which a short press cycles between display modes and a long press triggers a DCF77 reset. It also supports an external temperature sensor and real time clock module, if you’re using an ATtiny with enough pins.

We like this project; it’s simple and does one thing well, and it’s a welcome reminder that not every device needs a powerhouse of a processor. If you’re interested enough to build your own, we’ve featured someone doing a deep dive into the signal before.

Tips To Model Your Next CNC Cabinet In CAD Before Buying Anything

September 15, 2026 by 10 Comments

[Clough42] has started a new CNC control cabinet build, and uses it as an opportunity to demonstrate why he models the whole thing out in CAD before ordering parts or physically building anything. One may wonder why to bother, and the simple answer is to ensure there are no surprises or waste. [Clough42] has built plenty of these cabinets and there’s always something that isn’t as expected.

Modeling out an entire cabinet sounds like it should be easy, because today one can obtain 3D models for components from industrial suppliers with ease. In practice, it’s a process fraught with little gotchas.

For example, a STEP file of a component can lack convenient geometric snap points. An enclosure will be a single entity, without a separate door (and certainly not articulated at the hinge). [Clough42] shows ways to deal with all of these, and more, in Fusion 360. With a few simple techniques laying out an entire cabinet in CAD can be easy.

Planning before buying or building is a form of prototyping, and prototyping helps surface problems so they can be avoided before they become costly. This concept extents to design work as well; model everything out to avoid simple goofs like a screwdriver handle trapped by its surrounding bits.

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Coffee Maker Steam Wand Gets A Safe Outlet

September 15, 2026 by 20 Comments

Sometimes a hacker has a specific sort of problem, and uses the tools they have to solve it in a way that just might be helpful to someone else. That’s the case with [Matvey Kukuy]’s Coffee Steam Dryer (V2), which performs the very specific job of safely swallowing up expelled steam and water from an espresso machine’s steam wand.

Steam purges into the top inlet and passes through expansion chambers, dragging cool air along with it, until it exits safely.

Steam wands are used to froth milk into a velvety texture, and some machines require purging the wand before using it for best results. Where does the resulting jet of steam and spatter of superhot water droplets go? Not the machine’s problem. That’s for the user to deal with, and [Matvey] decided to address it by designing and 3D printing a tool.

The pipe-like object works by having steam jet into the open top (printed in ABS or ASA for heat resistance) where the device redirects the hot gas and captures any expelled water in the process. The steam flows through expansion chambers, dragging cool air along with it in the process, until it ultimately gets redirected away from the user.

By the time steam exits the outlet, some has condensed and the remainder has cooled and slowed down enough to not be a worry.

It’s the second version of the device, and we like how it has no moving parts and can be disassembled for cleaning and drying.

Coffee is an area that is rich with hacker activity, from 3D-printed micro-brew machines to completely DIY roasters but tools like this show how improving the coffee workflow can also be beneficial.