The return of the Yoctopuce mailbox

By martinm, in Internet of Things and DIY, february 21,2014.

Do you remember the laser mailbox? It works quite well, but we noticed a very annoying defect. Because the mailbox is made of metal sheets, it tends to slightly deform itself depending on temperature changes. This deformation changes the laser beam trajectory inside the box, sometimes to the point of bringing it off the light sensor target. Therefore, we had to regularly adjust the mailbox to solve this issue. After a while, we had enough and we came up with another idea to fix this. But this time, we are seeing big: we are going to render our mailbox autonomous thanks to a solar panel and a Wifi connection.

Building a MIDI automatic organ

By mvuilleu, in Internet of Things, january 24,2014.

Among the precursors of today's automatic systems, we have the magnificient fairground organs used to accompany fairground rides and attractions in the 19th century. Without pretending to go into something as magisterial, we didn't resist the temptation to build an automatic instrument driven by a computer, based on Yoctopuce modules, to see where the difficulties would lay. Result: it's quite easy and it's not even that long to do. Supporting evidence in a video below!

A Tweet controlled Christmas ornament

By Sébastien Rinsoz, in Internet of Things, december 19,2013.

The holiday season is starting presently and it is more than time to take out Christmas decorations. While rummaging in the attic, we happened on an old ornament in the shape of a snowman. We thought that there had to be a way to make this basic ornament into something much more interesting. And what if YOU could control our Christmas ornament with a Tweet? Let's see how to put this idea into practice…

An autonomous water rocket launcher

By martinm, in Internet of Things and DIY, november 15,2013.

You probably heard of water rockets and might know that it's quite easy to build them yourself with soda bottles and hose nozzles. This type of "toy" can be propelled to quite breathtaking heights, which makes it a rather fun hobby. Well, Yoctopuce looked into it...

An autonomous solar weather station

By martinm, in Internet of Things and Measures, october 24,2013.

Do you recall the solar box? Actually, it has never worked well enough to be useful. Here at Yoctopuce, it has been renamed the NULL box. Ruthless, but not so far from reality. But this week, we have a new version of that experiment. This time, it is much easier to make it work because we now have hardware designed with that kind of application in mind.