In Al Williams’s marvelous rant he points out a number of the problems with speaking to computers. Obvious problems with voice control include things like multiple people talking over each …read more ..read more

If we’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that the only thing hardware hackers love more than a device festooned with buttons is one that’s covered in LEDs — so …read more ..read more

If you want to add humidity and temperature sensors to your home automation sensor, you can — like [Maker’s Fun Duck] did — buy some generic ones for about a …read more ..read more

[Mellow_Labs] wanted an Everything Presence Lite kite but found it was always out of stock. Therefore, he decided to create his own. The kit uses a millimeter wave sensor as …read more ..read more

[Jeff Sandberg] has put a fair bit of effort into adding solar and battery storage with associated smarts to his home, but his energy usage statistics were incomplete. His solution …read more ..read more

Over the last decade or so, we’ve been inundated with appliances with wireless or “smart” technology that is often of dubious utility. No one really needs a tablet in their …read more ..read more

Modern tech is great, but we have to admit that we sometimes miss when electronic things looked complicated. A modern computer looks dull compared to, say, an IBM 360. Control rooms now look no different than a stock trading room, instead of being full of indicators, knobs, and buzzers. [BorisDigital] must have some of those same feelings. He built a very cool control panel for his Home Assistant setup. He based it somewhat on a jet cockpit and a little on a nuclear plant control room, and the result, as you can see in the video below, is great. This is less of a how-to video and more of an i ..read more

[Markus] grabbed an ESP32 and created a good-looking e-ink dashboard that can act as a status display for Home Automation. However, the hardware is generic enough that it could work as a weather station or even a task scheduler. The project makes good use of modules, so there isn’t much to build. A Waveshare 2.9-inch e-ink panel and an ESP32, along with a power supply, are all you need. The real work is in the software. Of course, you also need a box to put it in, but with 3D printing, that’s hardly a problem. Well, it isn’t a problem unless — like [Markus] — you don’t have a 3D printer. Inst ..read more

Home automation is huge right now in consumer electronics, but despite the wide availability of products on the market, hackers and makers are still spinning up their own solutions. It could be because their situations are unique enough that commercial offerings wouldn’t cut it, or perhaps they know how cheaply many automation tasks can be implemented with today’s microcontrollers. Still others go the DIY route because they’re worried about the privacy implications of pushing such a system into the cloud. Seeing how many of you were out there brewing bespoke automation setups gave us the idea ..read more

While there’s still something undeniably cool about the flip-open communicators used in the original Star Trek, the fact is, they don’t really look all that futuristic compared to modern mobile phones. But the upgraded “combadges” used in Star Trek: The Next Generation and its various large and small screen spin-offs — now that’s a tech we’re still trying to catch up to. As it turns out, it might not be as far away as we thought. A company called Vocera actually put out a few models of WiFi “Communication Badges” in the early 2000s that were intended for hospital use, which these days can be ..read more