Posts

  • Spying on Roomba with a Noise Sensor

    The Roomba vacuum cleaning robot has been in the news a lot recently with claims that it is “spying” on its owners. Well, there is no reason then to not spy back. What is Roomba actually doing while you’re away?



  • Getting started with WeMos D1 mini and WeMos D1 mini PRO

    Add Wi-Fi connectivity to your projects with a board that costs $5 or less. Here’s how to get started with the WeMos D1 mini, and the newer WeMos D1 mini PRO version.



  • sQuiz - Quiz Game with Sound Sensors

    Buttons are pretty common in quiz games and are also easy to work with as input to a project. However, to make the quiz game more interesting, it was decided that some squeak toys should be used instead. The participants would have to squeeze the toys, resulting in all kinds of high pitched sounds. This is a weekend project that uses sounds sensors in a quiz game to identify which team answered first.



  • The Mirror Assistant - The First Version of Our Smart Mirror

    Brushing teeth in the morning just got better! A smart mirror can tell time, weather, news and more. This is our first prototype of a smart mirror, and we believe it is amongst the simplest and cheapest methods of building a smart mirror.



  • Making Your Smart Home Airbnb Ready

    Here are some things you should know before you rent your smart home or apartment on Airbnb. If you want to avoid unexpected costs and protect your personal data, you should go through this checklist. We created it when we marketed our apartment as smart home last month. We had 6 different guests and got very positive reviews.



  • Voice Assistants Language Lesson 101

    One of the challenges for users of the voice assistants such as Amazon Echo, Google Assistant or Apple’s Siri is the “what can I say?” aspect, in that users have to remember the invocation and action phrases that work with the device. It’s almost like we need to take language lessons to be able to speak to these devices - and that’s exactly what we prepared for you.



  • Fridge Heatmap (or Coolmap)

    The cool temperature inside the fridge helps to keep the food fresh and slow down the creation of bacteria. However, it has been reported (food.gov.uk, eufic.org, cnet.com) that the temperature is not constant inside the fridge and that there is a proper way of organizing the food based on that. Is that true? And if so, how would a heatmap (or coolmap) of a fridge look like? Let’s find out!



  • Building a Wi-Fi connected kitchen scale (or coaster)

    We built a Wi-Fi connected kitchen scale that can be used for measuring how much milk you have left in your fridge or, if you use it as a coaster, measure how fast you drink your beer.



  • Got Milk? Building a Smart Fridge Weight Scale

    Wouldn’t it be nice to know how much milk you have left in the fridge while you are out shopping? The ‘smart’ fridges might be on their way to the market, but they are not cheap. We started testing the feasibility of a small module that can be added in a ‘dumb’ fridge and this is what we have learned.



  • DataFeeds - A Feed Monitor for Adafruit.IO

    We are happy to announce that we have just released our first app in the App Store! It’s free, available both on iOS and tvOS and it’s called DataFeeds. It’s an app that allows you to monitor your feeds from the Adafruit IO service.



  • Inside a kitchen weight scale

    Ever wondered what is inside a kitchen scale? Does it use any of the sensors that you can buy from your favorite electronics store?



  • Hello World!

    Today we have registered MonoHelix Labs as a company and we can start operating! We have also transfered the few articles that we had on MonoHelix.com webpage to MonoHelix Labs.



  • Inside an Estimote Location Beacon

    Estimote Location Beacons are small wireless sensors that talk Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), have motion, temperature, ambient light and magnetometer sensors integrated, and also have a GPIO connector.



  • Teardown of 360º camera Ricoh Theta S

    Ricoh Theta S is a camera with two lenses that allows you to capture spherical images and videos. It’s very slim and easy to use, but accidents can happen. We dropped ours by mistake, which gave us a reason to take a look at what’s inside!