Are you also afraid that your plants might die when you go on vacation? Me too! Now I have finally solved this problem for good!

In this video I'm transforming my prototype of an automated watering system into a final product in a beautiful packaging. It's been somewhat of a long process and I ended up spending much more time on this, than I had planned on. But I definitely think it was worth it! Do you?

Enjoy!

MuJoCo stands for Multi-Joint dynamics with Contact. It is a general purpose physics engine that aims to facilitate research and development in robotics, biomechanics, graphics and animation, machine learning, and other areas that demand fast and accurate simulation of articulated structures interacting with their environment. Initially developed by Roboti LLC, it was acquired and made freely available by DeepMind in October 2021, and open sourced in May 2022. The MuJoCo codebase is available at the google-deepmind/mujoco repository on GitHub.

Jooki was a dream come true for parents—an intuitive, screen-free audio player that let kids enjoy music and stories with the tap of a token. But that dream turned into frustration when the company behind Jooki went bankrupt, leaving countless devices bricked and families frustrated. But what if Jooki isn’t as dead as it seems?

This blog post isn’t just about fixing a broken audio player—it’s about peeling back the layers of its firmware, finding hidden exploits, a backdoor and unlocking code execution.

We recently got a note in the tips line from [Tavis Gustafson], who is one of the developers of Tronbyt — a replacement firmware and self-hosted backend that breaks the Tidbyt smart display free from its cloud dependency. When they started the project, [Tavis] says the intent was simply to let privacy-minded users keep their data within the local network, which was itself a goal worthy enough to be featured on these pages.

We were thinking about the first such bot we’ve ever seen, and couldn’t come up with anything earlier than Hektor, a spray-painting version of this idea by [Juerg Lehni]. And since then, it’s reappeared in numerous variations.

Details on how we organised thousands of tracks to build a music discovery service that lets you find your next favourite song from BBC Introducing acts.

For map-lovers like [Christopher Getschmann], poring over a quality map can be as satisfying as reading a good book. Good maps can be hard to come by, though, especially at a scale worth looking at, or worth using as adornment on a dull, lifeless wall. The solution is obvious: build a wall-mount CNC plotter to draw maps directly on the wall.

For quite some time I entertained the thought of having a wall-sized world map. Maybe it started when I read the blog post by Dominik Schwarz about his map, maybe a bit earlier. Exactly as Dominik I soon realized it’s really hard to buy a map which is neither ugly nor has a low resolution/amount of details.

We’re excited to announce two new smartwatches that run open source PebbleOS and are compatible with thousands of your beloved Pebble apps.

I’ve always been a bit rubbish at looking after plants. I’m not a particularly organised person and all too often I forget to water them so they end up being in a near permanent state of drought. On occasions when I do remember to water them it will turn out that my (much more organised) wife has done it already and I end up overwatering which is apparently just as bad.

In this episode I talk about capacitive soil moisture sensors and why 82% of them dont work correctly. I analyze the 3 most common problems they have by design and show you how to fix them or how to find sensors that work right away.