[malikaii] needed to set up some kind of tripwire style alarm system for his office. His bosses kept sneaking in to find him slacking. So, like any loyal hacker, instead of just working harder he built an alarm system. After a failed attempt to recreate an IR alarm circuit he found on the web and built from old appliance parts, he found the Hack a Day article about harvesting McDonald’s toys. The end result was a fully functional IR detecting alarm for the office doorway. This is pretty simple really, the best kind of hack.
Love it.
…Lets hope his bosses don’t read hackaday, lol.
i guess hes not a programmer or he could have used this excuse http://xkcd.com/303/
Now that’s hacking by trial and error…
Really? You worked that hard so that you can screw around and make it look like you’re working when the boss comes around? That’s what I call premeditated slacking.
Apparently you also don’t know anything about electronics either. I’m sorry, but if you have a 10 k ohm resistor in series with an LED and apply 3.3 V across the construction, you cannot get more than I = E/R = 3.3V/10kohm = 0.33 mA of current to flow, even ignoring the LED’s forward voltage drop. And he wanted 20 mA to flow?
An RCA plug on the power supply? That’s not a great idea either, since it’s ridiculously easy to short across.
10K? sure you didnt see it wrong?
looks like 470 in series with both LEDs to me
very useful hack. :) we need MORE ANTI-BOSS HACKS like this!!!
@ColinB Ur gay.
@ aLEX g
In the write up he mentions trying a 10kR resistor in series for current limiting.
Now, I was just thinking I need something like that!
I work with ole malikai, if you could call it work. The penguin is awesome. Only thing that sucks it he died. His battery ran out of volts.
I have many fond memories of sitting in my chair daydreaming up some hacks, perusing hack-a-day, and at the alarm of the ever vigilant penguin myself and my co-workers could make ourselves look busy real quick.
We need to give malikai a prize or some project money.
High five dude!
While I *try* not to slack off at work (God knows it’s hard sometimes, attention just seems to wander when there’s too much to do) this would be useful to me, if I actually had a door, lol.
Mainly because my boss is noisy most of the time, but sometimes he suddenly becomes a ninja. I’ll be hard at work, absorbed in a project, and out of the blue he’ll be behind me, loudly asking a question or whatever. It makes me jump every time, I hate that.
Lol i’ve done the same thing with this mc donald’s toy, and another one with the one with the rocket on the back (it detect vibrations instead of a IR detecting system)
The only hard thing in it is to open the “pinguin” lol, it very hardly glued ! !
I don’t know about this, Skipper…
I did something along these line with a singing Billy Bass when I was a kid. I took the whole thing apart (still have the “fish” portion nailed to my wall… don’t ask) and I set up the motion sensor to point across the doorway. There was a closet right next to the door, so I put the rest of the electronics in there and fed the leads to the motion sensor under the closet door.
I can still hear that thing in my sleep.