Kritik sah

Solar power has gotten cheap enough that putting up panels is among the cheapest ways of providing energy. This isn’t just the case for bulk electricity on a power grid, either; even small devices are easier and cheaper to power with solar than ever before. For example, landscape lighting which once relied on 12V or 24V DC wires all over one’s yard with a transformer and power supply hidden somewhere have partially been converted to simpler individual solar-powered lights now. These small devices can also be given additional capabilities as [Mauro] demonstrates . In this case, [Mauro]’s goal was to add on-demand lighting to a solar-powered light which was otherwise motion-activated only. To do this, they added a NRF24L01+ radio inside the light’s housing paired with an STM32 microcontroller. This secondary system is largely separated from the existing control circuitry with the exception of being able to switch the lights and receiving its power from the same so...

A die filer is a useful tool to have if you find yourself filing parts on the regular. It’s basically a machine that reciprocates a file up and down for you so you can focus on filing the part to your desired dimensions. They’re not commonly manufactured these days, so [Richard Huberjohn] set about building his own.  This die filer relies on a simple mechanism to turn rotational motion from a motor into reciprocating linear motion in the vertical plane. A rotating shaft is connected to a crank, which turns a pin in a slotted carrier attached to a linear bearing. As the wheel turns, the pin slides in the carrier, driving it and the linear rod up and down in turn. Attach a file to this, and you have a working die filer. In this case, the rotating shaft is driven by a pair of DC brushed motors, with output stepped down via a gearbox and then a short belt drive. Speed is varied with the aid of an off-the-shelf controller. If you’re regularly filing small parts, a build l...

The IKEA SKAFTSÄRV is an economical LED accent lamp, but while highly affordable it has only fixed lighting options. [simoneluconi] shows how it can easily be turned into a fully-configurable, WLED-connected, WiFi-enabled RGB lamp with little more than an ESP32-based board. A thirty-LED lamp with integrated diffusor and stand can be had for surprisingly cheap. Add an equally-economical ESP32 board and it becomes a whole lot more. To do this, the control board of the lamp gets replaced with an ESP32-C3 Super Mini board. Control and automation comes from WLED , open-source software that offers flexible automation and control for LED lights with a wide range of features, including native Android and iOS apps . Modifying the SKAFTSÄRV lamp is fairly straightforward, but opening the unit does require breaking some glued seams to get inside. Once that’s done, the replacement board fits nicely into the housing and the unit can be closed back up. As far as WLED is concerned, the new ...

After the digital camera rose to prominence, it became a cool hobby to keep taking photos on film. It was even cooler if you did the same with an old motion picture camera. The retro film revival has kept a dedicated bunch of photo labs in business over the years, but it’s still possible to save some cash on development by doing it yourself. If that’s your game, you might try mixing up your own development chemicals.  As explained by [No Grain No Gain], it’s quite possible to mix up your own ECN-2 chemistry from scratch if you know what you’re doing. ECN-2 is the chemistry you’ll want if you’re trying to develop any of Kodak’s Vision3 films, along with CineStill films. The problem with traditional methods of making developer is that once it’s mixed up, it doesn’t keep well, and the more you use it, the worse the quality gets. To beat this problem, this method involves producing two stock solutions which can be kept on the shelf for...

The vibrobot – a vibrating motor and battery attached to the head of a brush – isn’t truly a robot, since its movement can’t be controlled, but it’s whetted the interest of many future roboticists. With a clever control method , though, it is in fact possible to drive them in any desired direction while using only one motor. [Namaskar Mitro] based the design of this robot on this research paper ; if the vibrating motor is mounted at an angle above the base of the robot, it causes the bot to rotate, and if the motor is mounted off-center from the center of mass, the robot moves in a circle. Crucially, reversing the direction of the motor’s rotation reverses the direction of the robot’s rotation. By rapidly switching the direction of rotation, the bot can move in a series of short, shallow arcs which approximate a straight line. The robot which [Namaskar] built was based on an ESP-01F microcontroller, which let it be remote-controlled over Wi-Fi. It used a DRF8212 motor driver to cont...

Building your own sprinkler system controller isn’t that difficult on the face of it, but what happens when your system starts to grow, adding more distant areas? To tackle this, [Vinnie] leveraged the tried-and-true RS-485 differential pairs to communicate reliably with ever-more-spread-out valves on his farm’s irrigation system . The system uses a Raspberry Pi to control when each valve turns on and for how long. It does this via a custom RS-485 valve master board, whose code and design files are on GitHub . The master board communicates with the Pi over I2C and issues RS-485 commands while controlling the 12V line to the valves. Toggling the 12V supply is a smart move it lets [Vinnie] save power by not keeping the valves energized when idle. At the valves themselves lives a valve node board (also on the GitHub repo). Each node has a unique address so it knows when its name is called to open or close a valve. The valves are latching solenoids, ideal because they don’t require cons...