How to detect leaks in an irrigation circuit

By mvuilleu, in DIY and Measures, july 21,2017.

Irrigation controllers are very convenient to avoid the garden watering chore, but they sometimes create disasters. As times goes by, and with changes in temperature, pipes tend to unbend and sometimes to separate at the joints, creating local inundations which can be devastating the vegetable patch, for example. Let's see how to detect leaks as quickly as possible...

Interfacing a Wiegand RFID reader by USB

By mvuilleu, in DIY and Electronics, june 30,2017.

Among the requests that we received in the past few weeks, one caught our attention more particularly: how to interface a Wiegand RFID badge reader via USB, using Yoctopuce modules. It's interesting because Wiegand readers are widely spread in access control systems, and they are readily and quite cheaply available on the net. The good news is that we now have a solution, using a simple Yocto-Serial.

Checking remotely if a display is working

By martinm, in DIY and Internet of Things, june 16,2017.

We sometimes have customers who ask us whether we have some ideas on how to check that a display supposed to show videos is actually on and works correctly. It so happens that yes, we have a few ideas :-)

A connected smoke detector

By mvuilleu, in Measures and DIY, april 28,2017.

The usual method to detect smoke consists in measuring the reflection of a light beam on the smoke particles suspended in the air. Although we don't explicitly have a smoke detector in our product catalogue, we recently started offering a product which can be used for this: the Yocto-RangeFinder. Indeed, this sensor uses exactly the same principle for its main feature (distance measurement) and can therefore easily be used as USB smoke detector, or even as a networked smoke detector.

Automating a coffee machine with a Yocto-Proximity

By seb, in DIY and Internet of Things, january 27,2017.

Five years ago, we modified our Jura coffee machine, which we nicknamed Josephine, to control it remotely via a web page. The idea was amusing but in fact this feature wasn't really useful as we still had to get up to place a cup in front of the coffee machine. But today, thanks to the Yocto-Proximity, we can do something more useful: We are going to brew a coffee as soon as a cup in placed on the machine.