Introduction In this post I'll recap the development of a cloud-connected, solar-powered water quality monitor that I built for Voltaic Systems from May to August of 2017. Beginning the project, I was about halfway through the Arduino...
The reduced power requirements of ultra-low power systems enables the use of energy harvesting to extend battery life, potentially indefinitely. This leads to the question: How does one design an energy harvesting system? The first step is to understand...
The PanoCama is a design for taking stereoscopic panoramic photos. By panning and tilting the cameras, the device can reconstruct a single wide-angle image through image stitching. Through its dual-camera design, the system can create rudimentary disparity...
Story Recently, I joined the IoT startup Blues Wireless as a staff software engineer. I had no Internet of Things experience prior to this - sensors and microcontrollers and breadboards were not the kind of development I'd been doing. But when...
I've been interested in soft robotics for a long time. When I was working in the FX industry about 10 years ago I had a phone conversation with Barry Trimmer at Tufts' Biomimetic Technologies Lab. We talked about ways to use the many mold making and...
This is a formula for making excellent refractory material to use to line the walls of a melting furnace. I am routinely melting aluminum and brass and I have been looking for a formula that is strong and lasts a long time. All of the formulas that I...
I got around to start writing a basic feature list and some pseudocode for the longabord, which will all be written in Arduino running on the Adafruit feather M0 with Bluefruit. I have uploaded the document to the files section but also want to go over...
Follow me on Twitter: @SteveSchuler20 and right here on Hackaday: KRA5H. My table top photography studio is really a few simple items that nearly anyone can scrounge together: A cutting mat. Mine is lighter in color than the ones you often see (mine...
I thought that maybe I would be able to get the servo controller code below 1kB, and enter this project into the contest. And even if I don't, hey, it's a great opportunity to learn about AVR's TWI peripheral, so why not. Thus, for the last week I had...
Last week, the Conservify team started their tenure at the SupplyFrame DesignLab Residency! This opportunity is something we've been looking forward to for several weeks and we're very excited. This first post is going to outline the current state of...
Now that we have the firmware installed, it's time to start playing with Lua. Lua is a scripting language that has been around for many years. It was developed in 1993 in Brazil, by a group of university researchers. They wanted an extensible, easy to...
Features: Wind speedWind directionHumidityPressureTemperatureBattery voltsSoil moisture and temperatureRain (even in deep sleep)LoRa connectivityAdafruit Feather M0 MCU and radio moduleMCU watch dog (auto reset if MCU crashes)Full Deep Sleep (everything...
I talked about this several times but only on the side lines and I think I have to give this topic a bit more depth as its actually THE selling point of the whole project. I also want to talk about it because I made it a more extensive topic of my overview...
HardwareBased on my prototyping and testing, I designed and built a first prototype. This version used an ESP32 as the microcontroller and wireless connectivity, a LIS3DH accelerometer for impact sensing, and a AAA size lithium ion cylindrical cell for...
I built this handheld about a year ago based on Anthony DiGirolamo’s awesome concept of an RPi handheld and his great thumb keyboard: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3209958 https://hackaday.io/project/162281-teensy-thumb-keyboard Since I own...