Goal: a low-power, always-on home server that streams your local movies/shows to every device in the house and exposes a network share for the family laptops. Bill of materials: • Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB is plenty; 8GB if you want headroom for more services) • Official Raspberry Pi…
What it does: when someone presses the doorbell (or motion is detected), it snaps a photo and pushes it straight to my phone via a Telegram bot. Been running 3 months without a reboot. Parts list: • ESP32-CAM with OV2640 module • HW-104 USB-to-serial programmer for ESP32-CAM (or…
Weekend project I built with my 12-year-old. Result: an RC car you steer from any Android phone with a free Bluetooth joystick app. Range is about 8m line-of-sight, and a charge gets us roughly 40 minutes of zooming around the living room. Parts list: • Arduino Nano (clone is fi…
What I made: a snap-fit enclosure that holds an Arduino UNO, a half-size breadboard, and a 9V battery pack — so a finished project doesn't end up as a loose pile of jumper wires on the desk. Designed in: Fusion 360 (free for personal use). STL + STEP files in the comments — your…
Why I built it: my cat had a strong opinion that 5am is breakfast time. I have a strong opinion that it isn't. The feeder mediates. Mechanical: • Started from a $15 plastic cereal dispenser from a kitchen store. • Removed the manual crank and 3D-printed a coupling that fits over…
What it does: the TCS3200 is a square chip with 64 photodiodes covered by R/G/B/clear filters. By selecting one filter at a time and counting the square-wave output frequency, you can measure how much of that colour the surface is reflecting. Use case: I used it in a small conve…
The cool part: this doesn't need an Amazon developer account, an MQTT broker, or any cloud service. The ESP8266 pretends to be a Belkin Wemo smart switch, which Alexa discovers natively over your LAN. Parts: • Wemos D1 Mini (ESP8266) • 5V relay module (the kind with an opto-isol…
