Electronics For Dogs

Having your home or office kitted out with cat5 or cat6 networking cables is pretty much de-rigueur for any self-respecting geek. However, sometimes the sockets you fitted into walls and floors aren't as accessible as you'd like.

Inspired by some hotels I've stayed in, I designed and 3D printed the Desktop Network Socket. It's essentially a nice looking "back to back" connector. Not much real electronics involved but I thought you might like it.

Here in the South East of England, our water companies seem to run out of water pretty much annually. This year is no exception. Despite the wettest April for a hundred years, we're still in drought and still have usage restrictions. Whatever the future holds, it's very unlikely water bills are going to get any cheaper. So after all this, there's a way many of us could save up to 24% of our water bills - fill your toillets with rainwater.

When we bought our flat, we found the heating had no thermostat (how on earth do people live without one? I'm not sure...). Since I had an Arduino handy, I thought I'd make one. I got a handful of Maxim 1-wire temperature sensors, a few meters of Cat-5 cable and set to work. Here's what I made:

Back in August,  möp, möp! wrote an article describing how he'd hooked up his washing machine to his home network so that he could see when the laundry was done.

Here's a bit of a roundup of some simple power supplies. These designs are really just the basics; they're all a way to make a large DC voltage into a smaller one (eg. 12V into 5V, or 5V into 3.3V). These solutions are generally good where the application isn't super-sensitive to the output voltage, or indeed the "smoothness" of the output. Unless you're very careful about component choices, these are only good for low current applications.