I’ve have a DeLonghi Magnifica (ESAM 4200) bean-to-cup coffee machine and the most irritating part is turning it on and waiting for the cleaning cycle to complete – the unit turns on, heats up the water and then pumps a little through to make sure everything is clean.
Since getting an iKettle and being able to groggily say, ‘Alexa, turn on kettle’ in the morning to make the girlfriends tea, I’ve felt embarrassed by my stone-age coffee machine…
I recently found these candles which have a little RGBW LED inside and can be controlled via Bluetooth 4. They have a nice little feature where a small microphone built into the candle will detect if you blow into them, turning them off and – somewhat counter-intuitively – turning them back on again.
Continue reading Controlling PlayBulb candles with Python
A few weeks ago, I started work on internet connected bathroom scales, and I finally received my custom PCB’s to finish the job. I discovered that most digital scales use strain gauges to calculate the amount of weight on them, meaning there is almost no mechanical movement making them perfect to interface with.
The set of scales that I purchased handily had the Wheatstone bridge markings on the PCB silkscreen, which made connecting up the ADC nice and easy. Continue reading Hacking bathroom scales with an Arduino – PCB