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How to Kit Out Your Smart Home Without Big Data and Privacy Snooping

How to Kit Out Your Smart Home Without Big Data and Privacy Snooping

By Mike Senese

Mike Senese

Mike Senese is the Executive Editor of Make: magazine. He is also a TV host, starring in various engineering and science shows for Discovery Channel, including Punkin Chunkin, How Stuff Works, and Catch It Keep It.

An avid maker, Mike spends his spare time tinkering with electronics, doing amateur woodworking, and attempting to cook the perfect pizza.

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If you want to stay private, you’ve got to DIY it. 

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Tracking The NYC Subway Using FPGAs

Tracking The NYC Subway Using FPGAs

Whitney Knitter

By Whitney Knitter

Whitney Knitter

Engineering is my profession because it is also the hobby I enjoy. I started my blog as a method of documenting things for myself to remember how I did them, then it turned into a platform to help my fellow engineers. I studied robotics and RF in college then fell in love with FPGA design at my first engineering job.

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Using tech to do the important things, like avoid waiting around a subway station for 20 minutes

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Particle Launches New EtherSIM Platform with Free-To-Use Cellular Data

Particle Launches New EtherSIM Platform with Free-To-Use Cellular Data

By Mike Senese

Mike Senese

Mike Senese is the Executive Editor of Make: magazine. He is also a TV host, starring in various engineering and science shows for Discovery Channel, including Punkin Chunkin, How Stuff Works, and Catch It Keep It.

An avid maker, Mike spends his spare time tinkering with electronics, doing amateur woodworking, and attempting to cook the perfect pizza.

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Today at their online Spectra conference, Particle announced their new cellular-based IoT platform called EtherSIM, which opens their devices to a large network of carriers worldwide and adds the data plans into the Particle platform subscription price for professional users. Alongside, they also unveiled the “Particle Free Plan” which lets smaller users and makers access […]

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Set Up Your Own Private Smart Home

Set Up Your Own Private Smart Home

Kathy Giori

By Kathy Giori

Kathy Giori

KATHY GIORI is senior product manager at Mozilla; in previous roles she promoted open source hardware and software at Arduino, Qualcomm, and various startups. She holds degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota and Stanford.

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Smart home products, like dumb ones, fall into a couple different categories: there’s “fun and entertaining” and then there’s “practical.” Fun stuff when made smart tends to offer me the benefit of convenience; for example, I can ask a smart speaker to play my choice of music. Practical products can bring me added safety and […]

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Face Jam: Evade Facial Recognition

Face Jam: Evade Facial Recognition

By Mike Senese

Mike Senese

Mike Senese is the Executive Editor of Make: magazine. He is also a TV host, starring in various engineering and science shows for Discovery Channel, including Punkin Chunkin, How Stuff Works, and Catch It Keep It.

An avid maker, Mike spends his spare time tinkering with electronics, doing amateur woodworking, and attempting to cook the perfect pizza.

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Keep clear from recognition algorithms with these methods.

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Monitor Soil Moisture With An ESP8266 And A Hygrometer

Monitor Soil Moisture With An ESP8266 And A Hygrometer

Diego Moreira

By Diego Moreira

Diego Moreira

Diego Moreira full name is Francisco Diego Lima Moreira. Diego Moreira is a technician in Industrial Automation, graduating in Mechatronics Industrial Technology at the Federal Institute of Cear│ and Founder of the Arduino School Company in Brazil.

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In this article we will take the first step towards developing an intelligent system aimed at monitoring and controlling soil moisture in plants and plantations.

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