A cat skull enclosed in a domed security camera enclosure with green LEDs illuminating the eye sockets, sitting on a table with other skulls and rocks.

Cat Skull For Internet Connection Divination

April 1, 2023 by Abe Connelly 9 Comments

[Emily Velasco] has an internet provider that provides sub-par connectivity. Instead of repeatedly refreshing a browser tab to test if the network is up, [Emily] decided to create an internet status monitor by embedding indicator lights in a cat skull…for some reason.

The electronics are straightforward, with the complete parts list consisting of an Arduino Nano 33 IoT device connected to a pair of RGB LEDs and 50 Ohm resistors. The Nano attempts to connect to a known site (in this case, the Google landing page) every two seconds and sets the LEDs to green if it succeeds or red if it fails.

The cat skull is thankfully a replica, 3D printed by one of [Emily]’s Twitter acquaintances, and the whole project was housed in a domed security camera enclosure. [Emily] mounts the LEDs into the skull to create a “brain in a jar” effect.

The source is available on GitHub for those wanting to take a look. We’ve featured internet connectivity status indicators in the form of traffic lights here before, as well as various network status monitors and videoconferencing indicator lights.

IOT Message Board Puts Fourteen-Segment Displays To Work

March 28, 2023 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

We’re not sure, but the number of recognizable alphanumeric characters that a seven-segment display can manage seems to have more to do with human pattern recognition than engineering. It takes some imagination, and perhaps a little squinting, to discern some characters, though. Arguably better is the fourteen-segment display, which has been pressed into service in this just-for-funsies IOT message board.

As [Steve] tells the story, this is one of those “boredom-buster” projects that start with a look through the junk bin to see what presents itself. In his case, some fourteen-segment common-cathode LEDs presented themselves, and the result was a simple but fun build. [Steve] used some clever methods to get the display stuffed onto two protoboards, including mounting the current-limiting resistors cordwood-style between the boards. A Raspberry Pi drives the display through a very neatly routed ribbon cable, and the whole thing lives in a tidy wooden box.

The IOT part of the build allows the display to show messages entered on [Steve]’s web page, with a webcam live stream to close the loop. Strangely, the display seems stuck on the “HI HACKADAY!” we entered as a test after [Steve] tipped us off, so we’re not sure if we busted it or what. Apologies if we did, [Steve]. And by the way, if your cats are named [Nibble] and [Pixel], well done!

No matter what you do with them, multi-segment displays are pretty cool. But if you think they’re something new, you’ve got another think coming.

The ARPANET Of Things And CMU’s History Of Networked Soda Machines

February 8, 2023 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

When the computer science department of Carnegie Mellon University expanded in the 1970s, this created a massive issue for certain individuals who now found that they had to walk quite a distance to the one single Coke machine. To their dismay, they’d now find that after braving a few flights of stairs, they’d find that the Coke machine (refilled randomly by grad students) was empty, or worse, had still warm Coke bottles inside. What happened next is detailed by the Coke machine itself, straight from the CMU’s servers.

A follow-up by the IBM Industrious blog adds more feedback from those responsible for we now refer to as an IoT device, though technically it was an AoT at the time, being a pre-Internet era. For the bottle-based, 1970s machine, microswitches were installed by students in the machine to keep track of the fill state of each column and for how long the bottles had been inside. After about 3 hours newly added bottles were registered as being ‘COLD’, which could be queried from the PDP-10’s mainframe (CMUA) or via ARPANET using the finger command on the special ‘coke’ user account with finger coke@cmua.

As time moved on and the coke machine was replaced in the early 90s with a newer (and very much non-IoT) model, students would once again attempt to modify it, much to the chagrin of the Coke company’s maintenance people, resulting in the students reverting modifications prior to a maintenance appointment. This tracking system used the empty column lights on the machine, leading to a similar tracking system as on the 1970s machine, except now running on a PC-XT class computer that also tracked the status of the M&M snack machine nearby.

Whether CMU CS students can still query such highly relevant information today is not mentioned, but we presume it is an issue of paramount importance that has been addressed in an expedient fashion over the intervening years.

(Thanks to [Daniel T Erickson] for the tip)

Smart Ovens Are Doing Dumb Checks For Internet Connectivity

February 3, 2023 by Zoe Skyforest 86 Comments

If you’ve ever worked in IT support, you’ll be familiar with users calling in to check if the Internet is up every few hours or so. Often a quick refresh of the browser is enough to see if a machine is actually online. Alternatively, a simple ping or browsing to a known-working website will tell you what you need to know. The one I use is koi.com, incidentally.

When it comes to engineers coding firmware for smart devices, you would assume they have more straightforward and rigorous ways of determining connectivity. In the case of certain smart ovens, it turns out they’re making the same dumb checks as everyone else.

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Cheap Kitchen Scale Learns To Speak JSON With ESP32

February 2, 2023 by Jenny List 5 Comments

Smart kitchen appliances are expensive, and more often than not, your usage data goes to whichever company operates the inevitable cloud service. Meanwhile the cheap ones contain substantially the same components without the smarts, so surely a hardware hacker can add a microcontroller to a cheap appliance for a bit of smart home technology without the privacy issues? It’s something [Liore] has done with an Amazon Basics kitchen scale, removing the electronics and wiring up an ESP32 to the load cell instead.

The Wheatstone bridge load cell circuit generates a tiny voltage difference that’s far too small for an ESP32 to measure, so in between the pair is an Avia Semiconductor HX711 strain gauge amplifier module. In addition, there’s a small OLED screen and the two buttons used in the Amazon scale are wired in too, providing the the kitchen scale functionality you’d expect.

Naturally the ESP32 brings along with it WiFi networking capabilities, which [Liore] has taken full advantage of here. By navigating a web browser to its IP address, you’ll receive the scale’s current reading in JSON format. This should make it easy to integrate with other systems, from Home Assistant to OctoPrint. We can see that there is plenty of scope for further enhancements for those prepared to write a little code.

Of course, this isn’t the first enhanced scale we’ve brought you, here’s one with Bluetooth. We’ve also seen hackers dispense with the kitchen-safe trappings and build the load cell directly into their own contraptions.

NTC Thermistor To ThingSpeak Meter Makes A Great IoT Starter Project

December 20, 2022 by Donald Papp 5 Comments

There are a lot of IoT solutions and frameworks out there, and [Davide] demonstrates how to make a simple data logging and tracking application with his ESP8266-to-ThingSpeak project, which reads up to four NTC (negative temperature coefficient) thermistors and sends the data to ThinkSpeak over WiFi.

IoT can be a pretty deep rabbit hole, so if you’re looking for a simple project to demonstrate the working parts and provide a starting point, the project’s GitHub repository might help you get started. We’ve also seen ThingSpeak used to track toilet paper sheet usage, which is a nice demonstration of how to interface to a physical object with moving parts.

On the other hand, if you find reading NTC thermistors to be the more interesting part, you’re in luck because [Davide] has more information about that along with a modified ESP8266 Arduino library. Watch a tour of his temperature logging hardware in action in the video, embedded below.

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Fixing (And Improving!) An Annoying Apartment Entry System

December 11, 2022 by Donald Papp 7 Comments

[Zak]’s two-floor apartment has a typical door entry control system, but the setup is less than ideally convenient. The wall-mounted telephone-like intercom is downstairs, but [Zak] is usually upstairs. What’s an enterprising hacker to do? Obviously the most elegant solution is to simply do without visitors in the first place, but [Zak] opted for a more full-featured solution to the problem.

The layout of the typical wall-mounted door intercom is less than ideal.

He fixed things with a custom ESP8285-based board that, with the help of opto-isolation, allows him to detect visitors and grant entry without having to be physically present at the wall-mounted intercom. It’s even integrated into Telegram, and has a few neat new features. Let’s take a look.

The first interesting bit is how [Zak] rolled his own opto-isolation. The door entry system uses 14 VAC and is frankly — electromagnetically-speaking — a very noisy device. Attaching GPIO pins directly to this system from the ESP board for interfacing is not an option. The solution in situations like this is to use opto-isolation, so that interfaced devices can be electrically isolated from one another.

Rather than use off-the-shelf options, [Zak] opted to keep things small and economical by rolling his own solution using side-mounted IR LEDs on the small interface PCB. LEDs can also act as photodiodes, so by pointing two LEDs directly at one another and driving one LED from the door control system and measuring the small amount of resulting current on the other LED, [Zak] can detect states without having to directly connect a GPIO pin.

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