Server room overheat alarm

By martinm, in DIY, march 02,2012.

The cold season is almost over, very soon Summer weather will be here, and what's gonna happen ? You know it too well: your server room air-conditioning's gonna fail. Indeed, experience shows that the probability to see the server room AC fail with Summer days is directly proportional to the money the management intended to save by choosing the cheapest contractor. Unfortunately, we won't be able to fix your air conditioning, but we can help you to manage the crisis.

A color USB led light for laptops

By martinm, in DIY, february 17,2012.

According to Google, there are quite a few people landing on our web site when searching for a laptop USB led light. Well, we don't sell this kind of product... but we can show you how to build one using a Yocto-Color. It will cost about the same as a regular one, but you will be able to change its color at will, it will be programmable, and you will be proud to have built it yourself.

Luminous USB picture frame

By martinm, in DIY, january 28,2012.

Do you recall the USB/laser mail box? It is working well, thank you. But the signaling part has a big WAF issue. Indeed, a Yocto-Color device directly glued on the wall might look at bit ugly to some sensitive people. This article will explain how to use Plexiglas® refraction/reflexion properties to make a luminous picture frame with a changing color feature.

The laser USB mail box

By martinm, in DIY, january 13,2012.

Do you remember the Yoctopuce mailbox we customized to detect the postman? Well, the system was working reasonably well, but it had some flaws. We had to use insanely long and expensive USB cables, the ball-switch wires were too fragile to be put on an articulated part, and the system could only detect letters, not parcels (our mail box has two sections, one for letters the other for parcels).

So we decided to improve the concept using a Yocto-Light and a laser.

Josephine, the USB coffee machine (part II)

By martinm, in DIY, december 09,2011.

Do you remember Joséphine, our USB coffee machine? We noticed it was almost always doing an automatic shutdown right when we wanted a coffee. So we have decided to make an upgrade: in addition to remote controlling the coffee function, we will be able to remotely power it on or off, and to choose between a large and a small coffee. All this will be done with forty lines of code, including the user interface.