DIY RGB LED bar lamp

By martinm, in DIY and Internet of Things, july 28,2017.

This week, we show you how to build a bar lamp based on RGB LEDs. It's easy and you will end up with something almost as pretty as those you may find in your favorite appliance store. Moreover, each LEDs can be controlled individually, which is not a common feature among design lamps.

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.