Automating Your Door For $20

January 11, 2018 by 12 Comments

We love the doors on Star Trek’s Enterprise. We should have known they were human-operated though because they were too smart. They would wait for people, or fail to open when someone was thrown against them during a fight. [SieuweE] has a much more practical automatic door that he calls ArduDoor.

You might guess from the name it uses an Arduino. It also uses a windshield wiper motor which is perfect since it is high-torque and low speed. You might even be able to pick one up for little or nothing if you frequent the junkyards.

Continue reading “Automating Your Door For $20” →

IoT Garage Door Opener From Scrap

November 15, 2017 by 6 Comments

[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.

“Hey! Don’t Lock The Door, I’m In Here!”

November 13, 2017 by 24 Comments

Those that work in front of a computer for a living spend most of the time making very little sound. Unless you’re a member of the clicky mechanical keyboard club, your working time is a low-observables time during which people can forget about you. You can make sure you’re not overlooked with this smartphone hotspot presence detector.

[Emilio Ficara]’s quiet work habits resulted in his housemates locking him in sometimes, to his inconvenience. PIR or microwave occupancy sensors might have worked to fix the problem, except that a few flexing fingers aren’t always enough to trigger them. Luckily, [Emilio] is also wisely distrustful of free WiFi, so his phone is always set up as a mobile hotspot, giving him the means to reliably detect his presence. An ATtiny2313 and an ESP-01 do the business of polling for the SSID of his phone and blinking a bright blue LED by his door for his housemates. It’s not perfect, of course; it could easily be spoofed by anyone else who knows his SSID. But simple works for now.

With almost everyone carrying one now, smartphone detection is a good proxy for the presence of a person. But it doesn’t work in every case, so you may want to familiarize yourself with the aforementioned PIR and microwave methods.

Opening The Door To Functional Prints

October 14, 2017 by 11 Comments

If you are going to do something as a joke, there is nothing to say that you can’t do a nice job of it. If you’re like [Michael], a whimsical statement like “Wouldn’t it be funny to put Gründerzeit-style doors on the server cabinet?” might lead down a slippery slope. True to his word, [Michael] not only installed the promised doors, but he did a darn nice job of it.

Buying new doors was the easy part because the door frame and hinges were not standardized back then, so there was nothing on the server cabinet to his mount doors. He walks us through all the steps but the most interesting point was the 3D printed door hinges which [Michael] modeled himself and printed in steel. His new hinges feature his personal flair, with some Voronoi patterning while matching the shape of the originals. We love seeing 3D printed parts used as functional hardware, and hinges are certainly a piece of hardware meant to hold up under pressure.

This is not the first 3D printed door hardware we’ve seen. Check out this innovative latch printed as a single piece and here’s the skinny on making flexible objects yourself.

Continue reading “Opening The Door To Functional Prints” →

Scooter Wheels Keep DIY Barn Doors On Track

September 23, 2017 by 6 Comments

[MotoGeeking] built a giant spray booth and is in the process of making customized, air-filtering barn doors for it. When it came to buy hardware to move the doors, though, he found all the ready-made options to be prohibitively expensive. You know what comes next: he designed barn door hardware from the ground up, and did it as cheaply as possible.

After intensely studying many images of barn doors and hardware, [MotoGeeking] decided on the right wheels and went from there. Kick scooter wheels fit the bill nicely, since they are designed to support a lot of weight and come with their own bearings and spacers. And they’re cheap, too — just $9 for a pair.

[MotoGeeking] found some C channel extruded aluminium that seemed to be a perfect match for the wheels, but the wheel was quick to bind whenever it touched the sides. He solved that one by epoxying a length of round bar into the bottom corners. This allows the wheel to move freely while forcing it to stay centered in the track.

In designing the 1/4″ aluminium brackets, [MotoGeeking] took a measure thrice, order once approach to selecting the fasteners. You probably know by now that McMaster-Carr has free CAD drawings for every little thing. [MotoGeeking] imported the ones he liked into Illustrator and built around them. This helped him get it right the first time and kept the headaches and hair-tearing away. Watch the giant door skeleton glide effortlessly on its track after the break.

Continue reading “Scooter Wheels Keep DIY Barn Doors On Track” →

Have Alexa Open Your Garage Door

September 3, 2017 by 17 Comments

[yoyotechKnows] built an Alexa-controlled garage door opener after his Liftmaster stopped working. Now all he has to do is holler at his mobile phone and he can raise and lower his garage doors at will.

His project is based around a Photon WiFi kit, with a pair of LCC 120 digital relays triggering the two doors, reed switches, and a serial-equipped LCD to display door status, with Alexa, IFTTT, and OpenHab to process the commands. You can find his code in the project writeup.

Currently he has a LCD display informing him of the status of each door, hot glued a reed switch to keep track of whether each one is closed. This might seem a little bit extraneous since he can also just look at the doors from within the garage. However, he’s thinking about putting the display inside his house. But couldn’t he just ask Alexa?

We love us our home automation here at Hackaday, with everything from swimming pools to chicken coops rigged for app control and datalogging.

Continue reading “Have Alexa Open Your Garage Door” →

Irising Chicken Coop Door

July 15, 2017 by 26 Comments

What’s cooler than a door that irises open and closed? Not much. They add a nice science-fictiony detail to any entryway. [Zposner]’s dad wanted an automatic door for his chicken coop, so [zposner] took some time and came up with a nice door for him with an iris mechanism. You’ll need to watch the video.

[Zposner] used a combination of laser cutting and a CNC router to cut the pieces, then sanded and painted the wood. After assembly, [zposner] started work on the control mechanism. He’s controlling the door with an Arduino and a motor shield; to let the Arduino know to stop the motor, [zposner] used limit switches which get hit as the mechanism rotates. Once the switches were in the right place and the code written, it was time to finish assembly and install the door on the coop. To keep the Arduino that safe, it was installed in a plastic container with a screw lid, and then hot-glued to beside the iris.

Unfortunately, chickens don’t necessarily care how cool something is, and in this case, they didn’t realize that the iris was a door – they refused to exit the coop through it. [Zposner] tried a few things before settling on putting the chicken on the edge of the door – then the chicken would realize that it could go through it.

[Zposner]’s dad now has a snazzy door that opens with a switch. It was a great project for [zposner] and his dad to work on and, even if the chickens seem unimpressed, they did a great job. Check out the iris porthole that a Detroit Hackerspace built into its door, or, if you really want to build an iris mechanism, but don’t have access to a CNC router, a laser cutter, or, you know, wood, you could build this out of bits you have lying around.

Continue reading “Irising Chicken Coop Door” →