sensor

254 Articles

2022 Hackaday Prize: Plant Monitoring System Grows To Include LoRa

August 23, 2022 by 7 Comments

Change on industrial scales is slow, but if you’re operating your own small farm or simply working in a home garden there are some excellent ways to use water more effectively. The latest tool from [YJ] makes it possible to use much less water while still keeping plant yields high.

This is an improvement on a previous project which automates watering and lighting of a small area or single pot. This latest creation, called FLORA, includes a LoRa module for communication up to 3 kilometers, and the ESP32 on board also handles monitoring of soil moisture, humidity and other sensors. It also includes a pump driver for managing irrigation systems so that smart decisions can be made about when to water. Using this device, the water usage when testing was reduced by around 30% compared to a typical timed irrigation system.

Using a smart system like this is effective for basically any supply of water, but for those who get water from something like an off-grid rainwater system or an expensive water utility, the gains are immediate. If you aren’t already growing your own food to take advantage of tools like this, take a look at this primer to get you started.

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Presence-Detecting Cushion Keeps You From Sitting Your Life Away

August 11, 2022 by 13 Comments

They say that sitting is the new smoking. They’re wrong — smoking is much, much worse, for you than sitting, and smoking only while standing or while jogging around the block in no way to justify the habit. But they’re also not wrong that humans weren’t made for extended periods parked on their posteriors, but we do it anyway, to the detriment of our heart health, posture, and general well-being. So something like this butt-detecting stand-up reminder could make a big difference to your health.

While like many of us, [Dave Bennett] has a wearable that prompts him to get up and move around after detecting 30 minutes of sitting, he found that it’s too easy to dismiss the alarm and just go right on sitting. Feeling like he needed a little more encouragement to get up and go, he built a presence detector completely from scratch. His sensor is a sheet of static-protective Velostat foam wrapped in conductive tape; when compressed, the resistance across the pad drops, making it easy to detect with a simple comparator circuit.

We admit to getting excited when we first saw the alarm circuit; a quick glance at the schematic seemed like it was based on a 555, which it totally could be. But no, [Dave]’s design goals include protection against spoofing the alarm with a quick “cheek sneak,” which was most easily implemented in code. So that 8-pin device in the circuit is an ATtiny85, which sounds the alarm after 30 minutes and requires him to stay off his butt for a full minute before resetting. The video below hits the high points of design and shows it in use.

Annoying? Yes, but that’s the point. Of course a standing desk would do the same thing, but that’s not going to work for everyone, so this is a nice alternative.

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Scavenging CDs For Flexible Parts

August 1, 2022 by 42 Comments

CDs are becoming largely obsolete now, thanks to the speed of the internet and the reliability and low costs of other storage media. To help keep all of this plastic out of the landfills, many have been attempting to find uses for these old discs. One of the more intriguing methods of reprurposing CDs was recently published in Nature, which details a process to harvest and produce flexible biosensors from them.

The process involves exposing the CD to acetone for 90 seconds to loosen the material, then transferring the reflective layer to a plastic tape. From there, various cutting tools can be used to create the correct pattern for the substrate of the biosensor. This has been shown to be a much more cost-effective method to produce this type of material when compared to modern production methods, and can also be performed with readily available parts and supplies as well.

The only downside to this method is that it was only tested out on CDs which used gold as the conducting layer. The much more common aluminum discs were not tested, but it could be possible with some additional research. So, if you have a bunch of CD-Rs laying around, you’re going to need to find something else to do with those instead.

Thanks to [shinwachi] for the tip!

Putting A Cheap Laser Rangefinder Through Its Paces

July 19, 2022 by 18 Comments

Sometimes a gizmo seems too cheap to be true. You know there’s just no way it’ll work as advertised — but sometimes it’s fun to find out. Thankfully, if that gadget happens to be a MILESEEY PF210 Hunting Laser Rangefinder, [Phil] has got you covered. He recently got his hands on one (for less than 100 euros, which is wild for a laser rangefinder) and decided to see just how useful it actually was.

The instrument in question measures distances via the time-of-flight method; it bounces a laser pulse off of some distant (or not-so-distant) object and measures how long the pulse takes to return. Using the speed of light, it can calculate the distance the pulse has traveled).

As it turns out, it worked surprisingly well. [Phil] decided to focus his analysis on accuracy and precision, arguably the most important features you’d look for while purchasing such an instrument. We won’t get into the statistical nitty-gritty here, but suffice it to say that [Phil] did his homework. To evaluate the instrument’s precision, he took ten measurements against each of ten different targets of various ranges between 2.9 m and 800 m. He found that it was incredibly precise (almost perfectly repeatable) at low distances, and still pretty darn good way out at 800 m (±1 m repeatability).

To test the accuracy, he took a series of measurements and compared them against their known values (pretty straightforward, right?). He found that the instrument was accurate to within a maximum of 3% (but was usually even better than that).

While this may not be groundbreaking science, it’s really nice to be reminded that sometimes a cheap instrument will do the job, and we love that there are dedicated folks like [Phil] out there who are willing to put the time in to prove it.

Saving Birds With 3D Printed Boats

May 31, 2022 by 22 Comments

Montana, rightfully nicknamed the big sky country, is a beautiful state with abundant wide open landscapes, mountains, and wildlife. It’s a fantastic place to visit or live, but if you happen to reside in the city of Butte, that amazing Montana landscape is marred by the remnants of an enormous open pit mine. Not only is it an eyesore, but the water that has filled the pit is deadly to any bird that lands there. As a result, a group of people have taken to some ingenious methods to deter birds from landing in the man-made toxic lake for too long.

When they first started, the only tool they had available was a rifle. Scaring birds this way is not the most effective way for all species, though, so lately they have been turning to other tools. One of which is a custom boat built on a foam bodyboard which uses a plethora of 3D printed parts and sensors to allow the operator to remotely pilot the boat on the toxic lake. The team also has a drone to scare birds away, plus an array of other tools like high-powered lasers, propane cannons, and various scopes in order to put together the most effective response to help save wildlife.

While this strategy runs the gamut of the tools most commonly featured here, from 3D printers to drones to lasers, the only thing that’s missing is some automation like we have seen with other drone boat builds we’ve featured in the past. It takes quite a bit of time to continually scare birds off this lake, even through the winter, so every bit of help the team can get could go even further.

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2022 Sci-Fi Contest: Multi-Sensor Measurement System

April 26, 2022 by 4 Comments

Many sci-fi movies and TV shows feature hand-held devices capable of sensing all manner of wonderful things. The µ Spec Mk II from [j] is built very much in that vein, packing plenty of functionality into a handy palm-sized form factor. 

An ESP32 serves as the brains of the device, hooked up to a 480×320 resolution touchscreen display. On board is a thermal camera, with 32×24 pixel resolution from an MLX90640 sensor. There’s also a 8×8 LIDAR sensor, too, and a spectral sensor that can capture all manner of interesting information about incoming light sources. This can also be used to determine the transmission coefficient or reflection coefficient of materials, if that’s something you desire. A MEMS microphone is also onboard for capturing auditory data. As a bonus, it can draw a Mandelbrot set too, just for the fun of it.

Future plans involve adding an SD card so that data captured can be stored in CSV format, as well as expanding the sensor package onboard. It’s a project that reminds us of some of the tricorder builds we’ve seen over the years. Video after the break.

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Weather Station Predicts Air Quality

February 13, 2022 by 7 Comments

Measuring air quality at any particular location isn’t too complicated. Just a sensor or two and a small microcontroller is generally all that’s needed. Predicting the upcoming air quality is a little more complicated, though, since so many factors determine how safe it will be to breathe the air outside. Luckily, though, we don’t need to know all of these factors and their complex interactions in order to predict air quality. We can train a computer to do that for us as [kutluhan_aktar] demonstrates with a machine learning-capable air quality meter.

The build is based around an Arduino Nano 33 BLE which is connected to a small weather station outside. It specifically monitors ozone concentration as a benchmark for overall air quality but also uses an anemometer and a BMP180 precision pressure and temperature sensor to assist in training the algorithm. The weather data is sent over Bluetooth to a Raspberry Pi which is running TensorFlow. Once the neural network was trained, the model was sent back to the Arduino which is now capable of using it to make much more accurate predictions of future air quality.

The build goes into quite a bit of detail on setting up the models, training them, and then using them on the Arduino. It’s an impressive build capped off with a fun 3D-printed case that resembles an old windmill. Using machine learning to help predict the weather is starting to become more commonplace as well, as we have seen before with this weather station that can predict rainfall intensity.