[Hans Nielsen] has a couple roommates, and his garage has become a catch-all for various items. And like any good hacker’s garage, it boasts an IoT controlled garage door opener. It had a problem though, it used a Particle Photon – a popular IoT board that required internet access and a web server to operate. So [Hans] raided his roommate’s spare parts bin and set-forth to rebuild it!
One of his main goals was to make something that did not require internet access to operate. Anyone connected to the local WiFi should be able to open and close the door via a web interface, and he would give our good friend [Linus Torvalds] a call to make it happen. The key component in the build is the C.H.I.P SBC that made the news a while back for being ridiculously cheap.
Be sure to check out [Han’s] blog if you’re at all interested in working with the C.H.I.P. He does a fantastic job of documenting the ins and outs of getting a project like this working.
So much work for one button press. Anyone sniffing on WiFi will be curious. I hope the web interface has moving target buttons to press a code to actually open the door.
He will probably use it with a smartphone, so about 300 app making outfits will learn about his access code including google and fecebook and twitter.
..Oh and of course dozens of government outfits will too, if the big tech companies know it they also do
To be fair, the Particle Photon doesn’t *require* internet/cloud access, though it does *default* to wanting to connect to the internet and to Particle’s cloud services. In your code, you can use
SYSTEM_MODE(SEMI_AUTOMATIC)orSYSTEM_MODE(MANUAL)to control whether your device automatically connects to the internet and/or the cloud service.I used this in a Halloween lighting project a couple of years ago. My lights were going to be outside, just out of range of our wifi, so there was no point in leaving the network connection active because it would just waste battery power. But I wanted to be able to connect to the cloud as needed, so that I could do over-the-air updates to my code. So I used MANUAL mode, and programmed it so that depressing the built-in MODE button for a moment would toggle the wifi/cloud connection.
The C.H.I.P. yikes! . notorious for being made of unobtanium and non-communicatium-42. I designed a product around their chip pro and have to redo the work as the only thing they do is change the shipping date forward on their site for the last 4 months. and thanks for the stupid name. makes communication a lot easier: ‘yeah, i have some problems with the chip’. ‘which chip? the c.h.i.p. or another chip on the board?’ ‘yeah..’ idiots. it could have been a nice product.
Overkill, could be done with an esp8266