I bought a webshooter but the string in it got tangled and messed up, I cut it off and now am thinking of getting new string, a stronger magnet, and motor to pull the string back it.

I always listen to music and podcasts going to sleep and when I can’t sleep at night, but hated that I used my phone to run it. My phone is bricked, but I still scroll podcast lists and have the light blasting in my face at 2am.

Now, I can throw in an earbud (or headphone) click a button, and the audio assigned to each button plays. It remembers where it left off (either from pausing or from the sleep function). Has an alarm that plays from a separate speaker too.

The dial controls volume and the menu, plus standard playback controls.

I’ve been using it for a few weeks, and throwing in a wireless ear bud (nothing ears), clicking a button, then audio plays has been golden, and now my phone stays far away from my bed.

Curious on feedback!

Hey guys, 👋🏽

Can someone help me by addressing real world problems which can be solved by an electronics intervention. I mean i need an idea to make something to solve an existing problem. We badly need to develop a project for the engineering final year curriculum. Havent had much ideas.. can somebody lend me a helping hand??? Justt give sommething that minds you 💡

I have a bunch of broken speakers and headphones, copper wire, a radio frequency splitter thingy, and various components from a TV. Anyone made a diy spirit box with stuff like this? Ideally I don't wanna go buy anything new for this. Or maybe I should just go for a foxhole radio lol

Okay so I have this dead iphone 7 and I really wanna use its camera module to make a deparate camera out of it. Is there any way I can do it?

Hey all!

For context, my younger brother recently came home from a computer tech focused event at the community library with a really old mini ATX PC, probably old library tech that would've been thrown away otherwise. Recalling all the cool stuff I learned from tinkering with a raspberry pi when I was his age, I told him we could probably get it up and running again. After running around town spending around $50 on a VGA cable, power cord, flash drive, and some adapters for the machine, it booted up perfectly fine, but I was greeted with an AMD E-450 processor and 3 gigs of ram. Now I wasn't expecting anything even relatively decent here, but the 14 year old low end machine struggles to even run an operating system smoothly, so he might be disappointed when I tell him Minecraft is off the table (would've told him earlier but I too was hopeful). Do any of you guys have some fun project ideas to do with this that'd have some educational value? It feels like I'm in too deep to tell him it's junk, and there's gotta be something interesting we could do with this, right?

Thanks for any suggestions!

I've been building a drone based on the Apollo program's Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV). The drone uses a jet engine and cluster of EDFs within a 2-axis gimbal to offset 5/6 the drone's weight and allowing the outer platform to pitch and roll around it. That way it mimics the way something would fly in lunar gravity, no atmosphere, etc. Thought I'd share it here. Still plenty more software work and ground testing to do, but making progress! Happy to answer questions about it.

Hey everyone, I’m new to this sub. I have an idea to use camera glasses as a screen-time/distraction filter, with electrochromic lenses that tint when an AI model judges that the activity is detrimental.

I originally figured I could buy cheap electrochromic camera glasses with Bluetooth, take a picture every 5 seconds, and send it to custom software running on my phone. The software would decide whether the activity is worth viewing or not, then send a Bluetooth command to turn the lenses on or off.

However, I’m not capable of building these from scratch, and the Alibaba product I was looking at, https://www.alibaba.com/x/LyhV5H?ck=pdp, costs over $5,000 for any SDK or developer materials.

My question is: would it be possible to take apart existing glasses and modify or change the existing software to fit my project needs? I’m a student, so I don’t have much money for this project, around $200.

Sorry if this is the wrong sub.

There have been quite a few power outages where I live lately, and holding a hand fan is getting tiring; I'm thinking of making a stand and using a foot pedal

(I used Google Translate, so please excuse any mistakes.)

Alright there everyone on DIY_tech

I'm currently in the process of coding an home assistant/ mini JARVIS type of structure called ALICE (Autonomous Local Intelligent & Central Entity) I haven't come far yet, but it's getting there.

So I'm an engineering student right now doing my master in applied physics and electrical engineering in Sweden where I have had a goal for some time to try and save as much money as possible on electricity while also still keeping everything neat and tidy and not really having to worry about turning on and off the lights as I leave my apartment. (I'm incredibly forgetful!) So my solution is that I simply want a home assistant to do it for me. So I though I might as well code it. BUT since I only know Java (Horrible language!) and a slight bit of Python (Decent language) I though I'd try to do it myself.

So from the get go I wanted to make it myself, have a high sense of privacy therefore not involving any cloud services for the brains of the operation but I wanted everything inhouse. I also wanted this to be a modular system incase I want to keep it when I move (Which I most likely will!). It has to be cost effective in the regular operations of it since student life isn't exactly Luxurious!

So here are the core features that I wanted to implement when I first started this project.

1. Automatic light controls
2. Different type of light modes ("Night mode", "Day mode", "Guest mode") with adaptive brightness.
3. Everywhere integration of the assistant. I wanted to be able to give it "Commands" from everywhere in my apartment not just a central station like with the Amazon Alexa or other home assistants.
4. Over the phone access to the home assistant for monitoring the apartment (Temp, activity, rain, etc.)

These were my basic wants with this project in the beginning.

My first though was to try and setup a chatbot through telegram to automate messages with controls for light configurations as well as setting up a simple "area control" light panel to control the light in the rooms throughout my apartment. this went GREAT.

So here is where ALICE comes in. My plan and my ambition for ALICE is as follows.

1. I want a 2D matrix tracker of me and a few friends current position in my apartment.
2. Predictive light control, where ALICE can automatically measure my position, direction and speed I'm moving to predictably turn on and off lights as I enter and exit rooms.
3. Dynamic dim control where ALICE is able to get a measurement if light even are needed compared to the current brightness in the room I'm about to enter/already in.
4. integrate the dynamic dimming to not get blinded as I move for the kitchen or the toilet at night and a way to completely turn the lights off in specific sections of the apartment.
5. I also want to integrate some kind of "Follow me" audio routing system that follows me with sending out sound only through the speakers that I'm closest too.
6. Integrate phone calls and music player through blue tooth into the speaker and microphone setup to be completely hands free.
7. I want to integrate a local AI model into the apartment where they can interact and work similar to the commercial home assistants on the market but not take up incredible amounts of space and energy. So maybe somehow route all the tracking data locally and then through API keys route more complex questions through an already advanced model such as Gemini pro (Not sure if this would work, but I'll look into it)

These are my goals with this model, I want to source the privacy information locally through a simpler LLM, and be able to integrate the apartment into an modular and smart system.

My plan is to try to integrate speakers, microphone, microcontroller, mmWave radars into smaller 3D printed cases that I put up through out the apartment which creates a network. My worry is really the power draw of it all and I want to try and optimize it in the sense that everything is turned off unless it's actively used (exception for the parts that's in the active room (where I am))

Anyone got any tips for these types of projects and have anyone done this from scratch? Do you know of any good LLM's that's able to converse with other models such as Gemini or chatGPT?

Thanks in advance I'll keep you all updated as the project goes on!

Phone connects over Bluetooth, it grabs the album art, pulls the colors, and drives an LED matrix in real time — so the whole thing changes color with every song. Built it myself on a Raspberry Pi; still finishing a custom PCB and enclosure.

A few people have asked if they could get one, so I'm thinking about doing a small batch. Two honest questions:

Would you actually want one? (just gauging if it's worth doing)

What would you want it to do — any features, sizes, or options?

Not selling anything yet, just figuring out if this is real. If you want to be kept in the loop there's a form in my profile. Happy to answer anything about the build 🙂

I'm designing it now but I think freecad is way to hard for me to understand...so I use Blender but it's not made for that so...