As predominantly indoor creatures, it’s important to maintain a healthy habitat for the hacker. [Kishan Pratap Singh] designed a clever solution in AirSense, an ESP32-powered air filter.

If you’re thinking of cleaning the air in your environment, you might also want to know some properties about the air coming out of the filter. AirSense measures PM2.5 dust concentration, Air Quality Index (AQI), temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure. The various sensors are mounted along the exhaust path of the filter, which lets your know what kind of air it’s pumping out.

The system drives a 150 mm exhaust fan mounted in a 3D printed cap that pulls air through a cylindrical Xiaomi HEPA filter inside a perforated metal trash can enclosure. The ESP32 and an LCD readout of the environmental data also live in the cap, giving the device a sleek look. While [Singh] chose to run the filter continuously, we wonder if it might be interesting to set it up to only filter the air if air quality drops below a certain level to conserve power, especially if you’re on a time-of-use power plan. That would require redesigning the sensor assembly (or running the unit in reverse), so maybe it’s over-complicating things?

We’ve seen the Xiaomi Air purifier filter mentioned before, but under the auspices of hacking it’s filter DRM, an open source air filter designed by [Naomi Wu], and even an ESP32 pressed into service to plug an air purifier into Home Assistant.

Back in the 1990s IBM had a pretty sizeable presence in the PC market, including its rather spiffy Aptiva series of PCs. Naturally their PCs had to feature heavily in another consumer-related thing that was popular in the 1990s, being smart home automation in the form of IBM Home Director. Recently [Ionic1k] took a look at this blast from the past, starting with one of the original IBM commercials.

At its core it used the same X10 protocol that similar solutions from RadioShack and others used, with many modules and packages you could get to use with it. You could also get a more bespoke installation performed at your home to move beyond mere X10, which some people are still finding when they’re buying a house.

Since this uses powerline communication, it required no wires to be run, just the requisite modules to be plugged into a power outlet, with the video demonstrating the basic setup and installation. The PC itself is plugged into the control module via the serial port, from which the Home Director control software can be used to create a configuration and control the state of connected modules.

Although X10 has the same issues as any kind of powerline communication, overall it seems like a very nice system, with a wide range of modules and absolutely easy to set up even for a casual Windows user.

Humans are odd creatures, and no two are exactly alike, which is likely why so many different methods exist for tracking the progress of tasks that must be accomplished. [Simone Giertz] has graced us with her own spin on task tracking that adds an element of chance.

[Giertz] tells us that she started with written lists that she tackled in dice-determined order to keep her from overthinking or cherry-picking tasks. While this worked fine, she longed for a more elegant solution. Approaching the UI first, unlike any Open Source project ever, she determined that a marker that could randomly point to a task on a vertical list would be most pleasant.

The bulk of the project was evaluating different mechanisms to make the marker pick tasks at random while not selecting a task that had already been completed. A set of magnetic toggles that could repel the marker proved ineffective, but a simpler solution involving moving the completed tasks past a divider won the day. The finished product has a satisfying selection mechanism that makes interacting with the chore chart a joy, which probably helps make it more likely things get done.

We’ve seen many productivity hacks over the years, including Arya’s Hacking the Self, this rotary time tracker, or this e-ink macropad.

Reverse-osmosis (RO) systems are one way to ensure that you get very clean drinking water. The Waterdrop G3P600 variety that [Tomasz Wasilczyk] recently purchased is definitely among the fanciest and ‘smartest’, with the faucet having its own 7-segment display and gaggle of LEDs connected to the actual RO unit with a four-pin connector. This naturally meant that whatever protocol runs on this cable had to be reverse-engineered for science.

The main practical benefit here is to make the system smarter — such as plugging it into a home automation system with ESPHome support, as well as make it play nice with refrigerator lines.

What automation and monitoring options exist here thus depend on what data gets sent between the RO unit and the faucet. Fortunately this turned out to be quite extensive, ranging from filter health, the water quality and pump status as well as air temperature and faucet state.

Unsurprisingly the four-pin connector turned out to be a basic serial link, with 5 V, ground and a 9,600 baud connection. From this it was easy enough to deduce the protocol, and by looking at what lit up on the faucet, a custom PCB wasn’t far behind.

After one blown-up fuse later due to getting 24 V instead of 12 V on the RO unit when tapping off power, the unit popped to life and was able to be connected to Home Assistant, from where the entire functionality and what triggered what could be mapped out. Of course, there’s still more to be discovered and reverse-engineered in the unit, but this seems like a good place to start.