DIY Home Automation With NodeMCU and Amazon Alexa

If you read my last tutorial on DIY Home Automation with the LinkNode R4 and Amazon Alexa you already know the jist of this tutorial, but instead of using a purpose built board this time, I am going to walk you through the steps to accomplish the same thing using a NodeMCU and a 4-channel relay board. As with every home automation tutorial here at The Makers Workbench, the purpose of both of these tutorials is not to show you how to fully integrate the system into your home's infrastructure, but to give you a starting point of how to control Mains AC powered devices using low-voltage DC devices.  [node:read-more:link]

Control an ESP8266 With Amazon Alexa!

Over the last year or so I have became captivated with anything and everything ESP8266 related, and rightfully so. This little WiFi module is everything I have been hoping for in a development board for years. It’s small and compact, and has built in WiFi, as well as several GPIO lines, and is Arduino IDE compatible making reading sensors and controlling things like relays and such very easy. In this review / overview I am going to take a look at the Linknode R4,  a new offering from LinkSprite, a fairly young company that is dedicated to offering the public affordable DIY home automation solutions.  [node:read-more:link]

Trigger A Servo With A Ping Sensor

This weeks tutorial revisits some of our past experiences with the HC-SR04 Ultrasonic sensor, and adds in a new element, the Servo! I decided to write up this tutorial as a resource for the students in my Young Makers class to follow in a project they are currently working on.  [node:read-more:link]

Illuminating NeoPixels with an HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Distance Sensor

This is a really quick tutorial that will show you how to illuminate a sign when someone walks past it. I decided to write this simple tutorial after I hear one of my favorite makers, Jimmy Diresta, mention on a podcast that he has had clients ask him how to do something similar. Jimmy said that he knew that you could use an Arduino to do this, but was unsure of just how to pull it off.  [node:read-more:link]

Using NeoPixels to Visually Indicate Temperature

A few days ago, I started working on a environment temperature monitoring project that I wanted to turn into a tutorial here at TMWB, and half way through, I decided to integrate NeoPixels as a sort of basic visual aid. Basically I wanted the NeoPixels to change color based on a hot / cold threshold. While this is simple in function, it will give users an easy way to determine if a room is warm or cool. [node:read-more:link]

Today we are going to learn how to read the RPM of a PC Fan. This also works well for the Water Pumps used in PC Water Cooling as well as any dc pump or fan that has a rotation sense wire. This is accomplished by counting the falling edge of the square wave generated by the  Hall effect sensor that is located inside the fan or pump. All we have to do is use the arduino to do is count that data, do some math for us, and output the converted data onto an LCD Screen. Lets get started!  [node:read-more:link]

Today we are going to walk you through the process of reading temperature with your Arduino and displaying it on a  16x2 character parallel LCD. This set up has many uses including displayign temperatures during home brewing, fish tanks, PC Temperature display etc. The code will scale nicely and it is so simple that a 5 year old can do it. So lets get started!  [node:read-more:link]

So you just finished soldering up your Sanguinololu 1.3A board and are ready to test it to see if everything is working properly, but before you can upload any firm ware to the board you need to burn a Bootloader to the ATmega 644P. In this tutorial I will cover using an Arduino or Arduino clone as your ISP programmer.  … Class starts after the jump. [node:read-more:link]