How to build a rain sensor

By martinm, in DIY, july 04,2013.

Most recent cars include a cool gadget: automatic windshield wipers, which start to wipe as soon as it rains. As we are curious by nature, we wondered how car rain sensors work and whether it was possible to build one ourselves, without needing to put a windshield in the middle of the garden.

Interfacing a building with a computer

By mvuilleu, in Electronics, june 28,2013.

Electric circuits used in buildings for signalling and control have some specificities. When you know them, it is easy to drive them with Yoctopuce modules connected to a standard computer. This enables you to replace obsolete programmable logic controllers with systems much easier to program, while offering a much more modular solution than dedicated PCI interface cards.

Using Yoctopuce built-in data logger

By mvuilleu, in Programming, june 25,2013.

Most of our USB sensors include an embedded data logger. It is trivial to activate this data logger. However, after using it for a while, we noticed that the programming interface used to retrieve the data is not very intuitive. We therefore decided to bring some improvements to it to facilitate its use. Here is an outline of what will probably change, to provide you with the opportunity to give us your feedback before the choices are definite.

What happens inside the fridge?

By martinm, in Measures, june 14,2013.

What exactly happens when we open and then close the fridge door? Obviously, the light switches on and off, but how do temperature and power consumption vary? To be frank, this question is not quite innocent. I started a while back to have doubts about how well, or bad, my fridge was working. I have therefore decided to get to the bottom of it. And I made some rather interesting discoveries.

What about the enclosure for the LatchedRelay?

By mvuilleu, in Misc, june 07,2013.

You may have noticed that we don't list any enclosure in the related product section of the Yocto-LatchedRelay. The reason is that, because of the power it supports, this relay is a little bit to high to fit as is in one of our standard enclosures. However, if you are ready to do a little work, there is a relatively simple way to make a Yocto-LatchedRelay fit into an enclosure. Here is how...