Barilla and Arduino: This is not your grandma’s pasta!

Reading Time: 3 minutestalians are notoriously protective of their culinary traditions, often rooted in the use of specific local ingredients, family recipes passed on from generation to generation, and strict compliance to the way nonna and mamma always prepared favorite dishes.  However, Italy is also a country of innovation and resourcefulness! So in the face of climate change, […]

Barilla and Arduino: This is not your grandma’s pasta!

Reading Time: 3 minutestalians are notoriously protective of their culinary traditions, often rooted in the use of specific local ingredients, family recipes passed on from generation to generation, and strict compliance to the way nonna and mamma always prepared favorite dishes.  However, Italy is also a country of innovation and resourcefulness! So in the face of climate change, […]

How a Smart Home Can Be A Safer Home

Reading Time: 4 minutesSecurity is one of the things we value most in our homes. A home is somewhere to feel safe, protected from the harms of the outside world. As a result, we tend to invest a lot of money in security features like well-locked doors, alarms, and cameras. Most of the tools we use to keep […]

Create vector video art with an Arduino

Reading Time: 3 minutesUnless you’re very young, then you probably remember watching a CRT (cathode-ray tube) television. Those work by directing an electron beam very quickly along row after row while pulsing power to create raster images. But it is also possible to create vector images by directing the electron beam along paths instead of scanning, which you […]

The Smart-Badge recognizes kitchen activities with its suite of sensors

Reading Time: 2 minutesWe all strive to maintain healthier lifestyles, yet the kitchen is often the most challenging environment by far due to it containing a wide range of foods and beverages. The Smart-Badge project, created by a team of researchers from the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), aims to track just how many times we reach […]

Film camera tester helps you tune your rig

Reading Time: 2 minutesBy their very nature, digital cameras are always measuring the amount of light hitting their sensors and use that information to adjust exposure times. But film cameras require adjustment to get the proper exposure for a particular setup and even swapping lenses can change that. Traditional calibration equipment is expensive, but this DIY film camera […]

This gorgeous headboard simulates sunrises

Reading Time: 3 minutesThe world would be a much better place if everyone could wake according to their own natural circadian rhythm and natural sunlight peeking through their window. But the world doesn’t work like that and many people have to force themselves awake. That’s especially true for people who don’t have conventional work schedules and this gorgeous […]

James Burton is giving legs their snakes back

Reading Time: 2 minutesJames Bruton gave that title to his most recent video as a good-natured jab at Allen Pan’s project about “giving snakes there legs back.” In Pan’s video, he built a robotic exoskeleton to let snakes walk around on motorized legs. But as Bruton noted in his video intro, those legs didn’t look very snakelike. So […]

Can you become the next Trombone Champ?

Reading Time: 3 minutesThe first Guitar Hero game hit shelves in 2005 and kickstarted the rhythm game revolution. While it wasn’t the first rhythm game, its inclusion of “realistic” guitar controllers changed the industry. It wasn’t long before competitor Rocksmith took things a step further and let players use real electric guitars. But guitars are so common; if you want to stand […]

This tinyML-powered baby swing automatically starts when crying is detected

Reading Time: 2 minutesNo one enjoys hearing their baby cry, especially when it occurs in the middle of the night or when the parents are preoccupied with another task. Unfortunately, switching on a motorized baby swing requires physically getting up and pressing a switch or button, which is why Manivannan Sivan developed one that can automatically trigger whenever a cry […]

Uroflow measures urine stream to monitor medical treatments

Reading Time: 2 minutesMany medical conditions can affect urine flow, either as the primary effect or as a secondary symptom. That’s especially true for men, because prostate problems often affect urination. Benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH), for example, is a non-cancerous enlargement of the prostate that results in a weak urine stream. BPH is usually treatable with medication, but […]

Flux is a kinetic art installation brought to life with Arduino

Reading Time: 2 minutesArt may be subjective, but all of our readers can appreciate the technology that goes into kinetic art. That term encompasses any piece of art that incorporates movement, which means it can be as simple as a sculpture that turns in the wind. But by integrating electronics, artists can achieve impressive effects. That was the […]

Build a smart home entertainment system

Reading Time: 4 minutesSmart homes have many benefits, and it’s not all about convenience, security, and chores. Entertainment is a big part of what we do at home, and smart technology can help us maximize our enjoyment of our home entertainment systems and manage them more easily. In this article, we’ll look at some of the ways smart […]

Digitize your collection of 35mm slides

Reading Time: 3 minutesSharing photos used to be a difficult task. Even after paying for someone to develop your photos and waiting to get them back, you’d end up with small prints that your friends would have to huddle around. One common alternative was 35mm slide projection. Photographers could snap images and then have them developed as 35mm […]

Add ML-controlled smart suspension adjustment to your bicycle

Reading Time: 3 minutesSome modern cars, trucks, and SUVs have smart active suspension systems that can adjust to different terrain conditions. They adjust in real-time to maintain safety or performance. But they tend to only come on high-end vehicles because they’re expensive, complicated, and add weight. That’s why it is so impressive that Jallson Suryo was able to […]

Crack combination locks with this nifty robot

Reading Time: 2 minutesBig names on YouTube like LockPickingLawyer show us that a skilled individual can pick just about any lock that accepts a key. As it turns out, combination padlocks are also very easy to decode and it is even possible to automate that process so that a robot can do the job. Doing so only requires […]

This pet feeder differentiates between animals based on their weight

Reading Time: 3 minutesA common problem among owners of multiple pets is how to feed them separately. If one animal needs special food, is on a diet, or likes to eat from another’s bowl, it becomes difficult to control each pet’s consumption. That is especially true when one pet doesn’t like to finish their bowl of food immediately […]

Using Smart Home Tech to Care for Your Pets

Reading Time: 5 minutesSmart home technology has a ton of useful and fascinating use cases for humans, but what about our pets? For most of us, our furry friends are members of the family, and if we can make modifications to our home to help them, we do it. The good news here is that there are tons […]

Standalone Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect-controlled computer runs BASIC for IoT development

Reading Time: 3 minutesIf you’re more than 30 years old, then there is a good chance that BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was the first programming language you used. Many early computers shipped with a BASIC interpreter in firmware, so it was the first thing users saw when they booted up their computer. While other languages are […]

Count elevator passengers with the Nicla Vision and Edge Impulse

Reading Time: 3 minutesModern elevators are powerful, but they still have a payload limit. Most will contain a plaque with the maximum number of passengers (a number based on their average weight with lots of room for error). But nobody has ever read the capacity limit when stepping into an elevator or worried about exceeding it. In reality, […]

A DIY non-contact digital tachometer for machinists

Reading Time: 3 minutesA tachometer is a device that counts the revolutions of a rotating object, with the most well-known example being the automotive tachometer that monitors the revolutions per minute (RPMs) of an internal combustion engine. But tachometers are useful, and sometimes a requirement, in many other applications. RPM is a very important datum when working with […]