Custom Bedroom Lighting Controlled By Alexa

August 2, 2025 by Lewin Day No comments

[Arkandas] had a problem. They liked reading in bed, but their bedroom lamps weren’t cutting it—either too bright and direct, or too dim and diffuse. The solution was custom lighting, and a new project began.

The concept was simple—build a custom controller for a set of addressable LED lighting strips that would be installed in the bedroom. Specifically, in the headboard of the bed, providing controllable light directly where it was needed. The strips themselves were installed in aluminum channel with plastic diffusers to give a nice smooth light. [Arkandas] then tasked an ESP32 to control the strips, using the FastLED library to work with WS2812B LEDs, and also the Adafruit NeoPixel library for using SK6812 LEDs and their extra white channel. The ESP32 was set up to provide a web interface for direct control over the local network. [Arkandas] also made good use of the FauxmoESP library to enable the device to be controlled via Amazon Alexa, which fit nicely into their existing smarthome setup. Files are on Github for the curious.

The final build works well, creating a soft light in the habitable area of the bed that can also be readily controlled via voice commands or via web. We’ve seen the ESP32 do other great feats in this arena before, too, albeit of the more colorful variety. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own smart lighting solutions, don’t hesitate to tell the tipsline!

DIY MP3 Player Inspired By The IPod

August 1, 2025 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

These days, the personal MP3 player has been largely replaced by the the smartphone. However, [Justinas Petkauskas] still appreciates the iPod for its tactility and portability, and wanted to bring that vibe back. Enter JPL.mp3

The build is based around the ESP32-S3 microcontroller. It’s hooked up with a PCM5102 DAC hooked up over I2S to provide quality audio, along with a micro SD card interface for music storage, and a small IPS LCD. The best feature, though? The mechanical click-wheel which provides a very tactile way to scroll and interact with the user interface. Everything is assembled into a neat 3D printed case, with a custom four-layer PCB lacing all the electronics together.

On the software side, [Justinas] cooked up some custom software for organizing music on the device using a SQLite database. As he primarily listens to classical music, the software features fields for composer/piece and conductor, orchestra, or performer.

[Justinas] calls the final build “chunky, but nevertheless functional” and notes it is “vaguely reminiscent of classic iPods.” We can definitely see the fun in building your own personalized version of a much-enjoyed commercial product, for sure. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own similar hardware, we’d certainly love to hear about it.

Building A Color Teaching Toy For Tots

July 25, 2025 by Lewin Day No comments

Last year, [Deep Tronix] wished to teach colors to his nephew. Thus, he built a toy to help educate a child about colors by pairing them with sounds, and Color Player was born.

The build is based around the TCS34725, an off-the-shelf color sensor. It’s paired with an ESP32, which senses colors and then plays sounds in turn. [Deep Tronix] made this part harder by insisting on creating their own WAV playback system, using the microcontroller, an SD card, and its on-board digital-to-analog hardware.

The toy operates in three primary modes. Color-to-tone, color-to-sound, color-to-voice. Basically, a color is scanned, and then the Color Player creates a tone, plays back a pre-recorded audio sample, or spells out the name of the color that was just scanned.

[Deep Tronix] also included jolly mode, which just color cycles a few RGB LEDs. However, there’s a game inside jolly mode as well, created for an older nephew to play with. Enter the right button combination, and you unlock it. Then, the device suggests a color and you have to run around, find it, and scan it to score.

We love a good color game; somehow this build seems even more compelling than Milton Bradley’s classic Simon toy.

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2025 One-Hertz Challenge: Pokémon Alarm Clock Tells You It’s Time To Build The Very Best

July 22, 2025 by Adam Zeloof 3 Comments

We’ve all felt the frustration of cheap consumer electronics — especially when they aren’t actually cheap. How many of us have said “Who designed this crap? I could do better with an Arduino!” while resisting the urge to drop that new smart doorbell in the garbage disposal?

It’s an all-too familiar thought, and when it passed through [Mathieu]’s head while he was resetting the time and changing the batteries in his son’s power-hungry Pokémon alarm clock for the umpteenth time, he decided to do something about it.

The only real design requirement, imposed by [Mathieu]’s son, was that the clock’s original shell remained. Everything else, including the the controller and “antique” LCD could go. He ripped out the internals and installed an ESP32, allowing the clock to automatically sync to network time in the event of power loss. The old-school LCD was replaced with a modern, full-color TFT LCD which he scored on AliExpress for a couple of Euros.

Rather than just showing the time, the new display sports some beautiful pixel art by Woostarpixels, which [Mathieu] customized to have day and nighttime versions, even including the correct moon phase. He really packed as much into the ESP32 as possible, using 99.6% of its onboard 4 MB of flash. Code is on GitHub for the curious. All in all, the project is a multidisciplinary work of art, and it looks well-built enough to be enjoyed for years to come.

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ESP32 Plugs In To Real-Time Crypto Prices

July 17, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 8 Comments

In today’s high-speed information overload environment, we often find ourselves with too much data to take in at once, causing us to occasionally miss out on opportunities otherwise drowned out in noise. None of this is more evident in the realm of high-speed trading, whether it’s for stocks, commodities, or even crypto. Most of us won’t be able to build dedicated high speed connections directly to stock exchanges for that extra bit of edge over the other traders, but what we can do is build a system that keys us in to our cryptocurrency price of choice so we know exactly when to pull the trigger on a purchase or sale.

[rishab]’s project for doing this is based on an ESP32 paired with a 10″ touchscreen display. It gathers live data from Binance, a large cryptocurrency exchange that maintains various pieces of information about many digital currencies. [rishab]’s tool offers a quick, in-depth look at a custom array of coins, with data such as percentage change over a certain time and high and low values for that coin as well. The chart updates in real time, and [rishab] also built a feature in which scales coins up if they have been seeing large movements in price over short timeframes.

Although it’s not a direct fiber link into an exchange, it certainly has its advantages over keeping this information in a browser window on a computer where it could get missed, and since it’s dedicated hardware running custom firmware it can show you exactly what you need to see if you’re day trading crypto. Certainly projects like this are in the DIY spirit that crypto enthusiasts tout as ideals of the currency, and as people move away from mining and more into speculative trading we’d expect to see more projects like this.

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Touch Lamp Tracks ISS With Style

July 8, 2025 by Tyler August 6 Comments

In the comments of a recent article, the question came up as to where to find projects from the really smart kids the greybeards remember being in the 70s. In the case of [Will Dana] the answer is YouTube, where he’s done an excellent job of producing an ISS-tracking lamp, especially considering he’s younger than almost all of the station’s major components.*

There’s nothing ground-breaking here, and [Will] is honest enough to call out his inspiration in the video. Choosing to make a ground-track display with an off-the-shelf globe is a nice change from the pointing devices we’ve featured most recently. Inside the globe is a pair of stepper motors configured for alt/az control– which means the device must reset every orbit, since [Willis] didn’t have slip rings or a 360 degree stepper on hand. A pair of magnets couples the motion system inside the globe to the the 3D printed ISS model (with a lovely paintjob thanks to [Willis’s girlfriend]– who may or may be from Canada, but did show up in the video to banish your doubts as to her existence), letting it slide magically across the surface. (Skip to the end of the embedded video for a timelapse of the globe in action.) The lamp portion is provided by some LEDs in the base, which are touch-activated thanks to some conductive tape inside the 3D printed base.

It’s all controlled by an ESP32, which fetches the ISS position with a NASA API. Hopefully it doesn’t go the way of the sighting website, but if it does there’s more than enough horsepower to calculate the position from orbital parameters, and we are confident [Will] can figure out the code for that. That should be pretty easy compared to the homebrew relay computer or the animatronic sorting hat we featured from him last year.

Our thanks to [Will] for the tip. The tip line is for hackers of all ages, but we admit that it’s great to see what the new generation is up to.

*Only the Roll Out Solar Array, unless you only count on-orbit age, in which case the Nakua module would qualify as well.

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Track Your GitHub Activity With This E-Ink Display

July 5, 2025 by Jenny List 5 Comments

If you’re a regular GitHub user you’ll be familiar with the website’s graphical calendar display of activity as a grid. For some of you it will show a hive of activity, while for others it will be a bit spotty. If you’re proud of your graph though, you’ll want to show it off to the world, and that’s where [HarryHighPants]’ Git Contributions E-Ink Display comes in. It’s a small desktop appliance with a persistent display, that shows the current version of your GitHub graph.

At its heart is an all-in-one board with the display and an ESP32 on the back, with a small Li-Po cell. It’s all put in a smart 3D printed case. The software is the real trick, with a handy web interface from which you can configure your GitHub details.

It’s a simple enough project, but it joins a growing collection which use an ESP32 as a static information display. The chip is capable of more though, as shown by this much more configurable device.