Here’s a fun idea I had while quarantined during the 2020 pandemic. I have a bunch of these cheap laser modules that can easily be driven from an Arduino with 5V, and they only draw 20mA of current. I also...

Project source code at GitHub: iridium-signal-strength-monitor In a previous article, I wrote all about Iridium satellite communication for IoT projects using an Iridium modem and simple Arduino technology. However, when trying to send a message to a satellite constellation, you...

Project source code at GitHub: wx-ground-station This project will show you how to create a fully automated ground station that will receive and decode NOAA weather satellite images and upload them to your own website served from an Amazon AWS...

When deploying a microcontroller-based IoT solution or just doing experiments gathering data in the field, you often need a way to get the data back to your home base or to the cloud somehow. You’ve probably used WiFi, maybe dabbled...

Here’s another fun but simple project using the Audio Hacker shield for Arduino. This is a realtime voice changer, which is an improvement upon the original voice changer example I provided with the Audio Hacker library. This project uses a...

Here’s a fun project using the Audio Hacker shield for Arduino – a realtime audio reverser! This program records the audio input to the Audio Hacker’s memory but plays it back in reverse. The “play head” jumps ahead a bit,...

LTE CAT M1 (sometimes called LTE-M) and NB-IoT are both exciting new cellular technologies targeting IoT applications. While there are many modems being built with this new technology, there are not many choices for hobbyists. There are a few Arduino...

Project source code at GitHub: node-red-contrib-twilio-ivr Twilio is fast becoming an important part of Internet’s communication infrastructure. What is Twilio? Twilio is a developer platform that allows you to add capabilities like voice, video, and messaging to your applications. This...

In part 1 of this series I showed how to set up a simple LoRaWAN gateway, and in a previous article described a simple but powerful LoRaWAN-capable end device that I designed. Now I’ll show how these devices can be...

I have been playing with LoRa modules a lot recently (see projects LoRa Weather Station and LoRa Mesh Networking) and even designed my own LoRa development boards. LoRa is an easy way to achieve low-power, long range radio communication with...

I’ve been doing some LoRa projects lately in order to learn as much as I can about this exciting new radio technology (see this LoRa mesh networking project and this LoRa weather station). ATmega328-based Moteino modules work great for a...

In this project, I will show you how I built a mesh network of 4 Arduino-Based LoRa modules and devised a way to visualize the network’s behavior in realtime. Using a realtime visualization we can see how the network forms...

Project source code at GitHub: wifi-camera-trap We have lots of small wildlife around our house (mostly rabbits this year) and since I have a small camera module and a cheap PIR (passive infrared) motion sensor, I thought it would be...

Project source code at GitHub: lora-weather-station In this project I show how I built a remote, solar-powered weather station that transmits temperature and humidity readings over LoRa, and a base station that publishes the data to the Internet with MQTT...

Like many other hardware hackers, I fell in love with the ESP8266 Wi-Fi microcontroller as soon as I started using it. It is fast, has plenty of memory, has Wi-Fi networking, and can be programmed in a number of ways....

Project source code at GitHub: iot-wifi-outlet They say necessity is the mother of invention, and there’s no question that the need to turn on my coffee maker while still in bed is a necessity. I don’t want to wait for...

Everyone playing with electronics these days knows about LED strips made of dozens or hundreds of individually addressable RGB LEDs. I love them and make great use of them in the nootropic design Lumazoid music visualizer. But what about incandescent...

The Audio Hacker shield for Arduino lets you do some cool things with digital signal processing. This new project shows how a fairly simple Arduino sketch can implement a low-pass filter, high-pass filter and band-pass filter. A low-pass filter allows...

This simple project shows how a video signal captured by a Video Experimenter Shield can be used to send MIDI messages to a synthesizer. A small camera module is connected to the input of the Video Experimenter (the red wire...

Wow, this is the craziest 3D printing I’ve ever seen. The material is concrete! Andrey has been working very hard for years to developed a 3D printer than can literally print houses. Here is the castle he printed. For more...

After a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign, the Synthino XM is finally available to the whole world. The Synthino XM is by far the most sophisticated device we’ve design here at nootropic design. We had a lot of help from our...

I’ve been working so hard on this new product, and it is finally a reality. Pre-order on Kickstarter!

I’m so happy to be one of the authors of the new book Maker Pro edited by John Baichtal. Maker Pro is a collection of essays by makers who have gone pro by starting their own businesses. Last year John...

The year 2014 has been the year of synthesizer design for nootropic design! After releasing the Audio Hacker Arduino shield last year, I continued to get more interested in audio processing. I started designing audio synthesis software for the Arduino,...

Many of our Defusable Clock customers use the device in Airsoft competitions where participants must find the device and defuse it before the timer expires. A great thing to do in these games is to trigger a loud siren or...