New Part Day: Indoor Location Systems

June 17, 2015 by 86 Comments

GPS is an enabling technology that does far more than the designers ever dreamed. If you want a quadcopter to fly to a waypoint, GPS does that. If you want directions on your phone, GPS does that. No one in the 70s or 80s could have dreamed this would be possible.

GPS, however, doesn’t work too well indoors. This is a problem, because we really don’t know what is possible if we can track an object to within 10cm indoors. Now there’s a module that does just that. It’s the decaWave DWM1000.

This module uses an 802.15 radio to track objects to within just a few centimeters of precision. It does this by sending time stamps to and from a set of base stations, or ‘anchors’. The module is also a small, and relatively high bandwidth (110kbps) radio for sensors and Internet of Things things makes it a very interesting part.

Some of the potential for this module is obvious: inventory management, and finding the remote and/or car keys. Like a lot of new technology, the most interesting applications are the ones no one has thought of yet. There are undoubtedly a lot of applications of this tech; just about every ball used in sports is bigger than 10cm, and if ESPN ever wanted even more cool visuals, just put one inside.

If you’d like to try out this module, decaWave has an eval kit available through distributors for about $600. Somehow, there’s also a Kickstarter for a board that uses the same module, Arduino compatible, of course.

Thanks [Roy] for the tip.

wireless reset button

Door Bell Used To Reset WiFi Router

May 2, 2015 by 48 Comments

We’ve all have had to reset our routers or modems at some point because they were acting up. The typical scenario is; unplug the device, wait 30 seconds, plug it back in and wait for it to boot back up. While not hard, this can be an annoyance, especially if accessing the router or power cord is inconvenient. [Taylor] wrote in to tell us about his wireless router that seems to need to be reset more than he’d like. Although the simplest solution may be to get a new router, he thought it would be fun to do something a little more exciting by making a wireless reset controller.

[Taylor] started with an ordinary power strip. He spliced in a relay to the hot side of the AC line, connected to the common and normally-closed pins of the relay. That way, when the relay is not activated, the power strip is powered. Next, a wireless doorbell was re-purposed to act as the transmitter and receiver. The speaker was removed and the output lines connected to a mono-stable 555 timer circuit that [Taylor] made. When the circuit receives a signal from the door bell speaker lines, it will activate the relay for about 30 seconds. Since the relay was wired to supply voltage to the power strip when not activated, activating the relay cuts the power for 30 seconds effectively resetting the router. Now, whenever the router needs a reset, doing so is as easy as pushing the door bell button from anywhere in the house.

garage door indicator

Indicator For Forgetful-Minded Garage Door Users

April 28, 2015 by 23 Comments

[Gareth] had a friend who regularly forgot to close his garage door after parking his car and heading inside. Since [Gareth] was familiar with basic electronics and an overall good pal, he offered to make a device that would indicate whether the garage door was open or not.

The project starts off simple with an Arduino and ultrasonic distance sensor. Both are mounted to the ceiling of the garage with the ultrasonic sensor pointed down. When the garage door is open, the sensor outputs a shorter distance measurement than when the garage door is closed.

Now that the system knows when the door is open or closed, the next part was sending a signal inside the house. He could have run a wire up through the house walls to an LED indicator but decided to go wireless with a 433mhz transmitter. There is a second Arduino inside equipped with a 433mhz receiver. When the garage door is open, the Arduino inside the house flashes an LED reminding the forgetful occupant to close the door.

[Gareth] made all his code for both the sensor/transmitter and the receiver available on his site for anyone interested in making something similar.

Raspberry Pi Controlled Chicken Door

April 11, 2015 by 18 Comments

We’re not sure if the Chickens know it yet, but they could be one of the reasons for all this IoT craze now a days. Look for chicken coop, and out come dozens of posts from the Hackaday chest.

Here’s another one from self confessed lazy engineer [Eric]. He didn’t want to wake up early to let his chickens out in the morning, or walk out to the coop to lock them up for the night to protect them from predators like Foxes, Raccoons and Opossum. So he built a Raspberry-Pi controlled chicken coop door that automates locking and unlocking. The details are clear from his video which you can watch after the break. The door mechanism looks inspired from an earlier anti-Raccoon gravity assist door.

The hardware (jpg image) is simple – a couple of hall sensors that detect the open/close status of the coop door that is driven by a DC motor via a bridge controller. The whole setup is controlled using a Raspberry-Pi and this is where the fun starts – because he can now add in all kinds of “feature creep”. Motion sensor, camera, light array, and anti-predator gizmos are all on his drawing board at the moment. Add in your feature requests in the comments below and let’s see if [Eric] can build the most advanced, complicated, gizmo filled chicken coop in the Universe. Combine that with this design, and it could even turn out to be the most beautiful too.

Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Controlled Chicken Door” →

A Secret Door To The Mines Of Moria

March 7, 2015 by 9 Comments

What home movie theater is complete without a secret entrance? [Eclipse_007] had the brilliant idea to make this Lord of The Rings themed hidden door, akin to the entrance way to the Mines of Moria.

It’s a custom door panel filled to the brim with LED lights on the underside. The front panel is a large piece of plexi-glass with a vinyl coating on one side. [Eclipse_007] painstakingly cut the design out of the vinyl coating, all by hand. Once installed the door just looks like another part of the wall. But when touched, the door lights up and then swings open, revealing the movie theater. Plans are already in the works to make it voice controlled to open when the password is spoken.

As one reddit user puts it:

That is probably the coolest thing I have ever seen.

I’m trying to imagine an estate agent introducing your house… two bathrooms, double glazing, five bedrooms, the Westgate of Moria which opens into a basement movie theater when you say Mellon, and a stylish modern kitchen…

Continue reading “A Secret Door To The Mines Of Moria” →

Another Garage Door Opener, This Time With Security

February 23, 2015 by 10 Comments

We’ve been seeing a lot of garage door opener hacks, whether it’s because one person inspired everyone else to build their own Internet-connected GDO or because there’s something in the water that’s caused the simultaneous building of one specific type of project, we’re not sure. However, the latest one we’ve seen adds a little something extra: motion-based security.

[DeckerEgo] really went all out with this one, too. The core of the project is a Raspberry Pi hardwired to a universal garage door remote. The Pi also handles a small webcam and runs a program called motion, which is a Linux program that allows for all kinds of webcam fun including motion detection. While the other builds we see usually use a button or limit switch to tell whether the door is open or closed, this one just watches the door with the webcam so [DeckerEgo] can actually see what’s going on in the garage. As a bonus, the motion software can be configured to alert him if anything suspicious is going on in the garage.

The build is full-featured as well, with an interesting user interface overlaid on the live picture of the garage door. According to [DeckerEgo] the camera is a necessity because he wouldn’t trust a simple status indicator, but if you wanted to try one of those before breaking out the Raspberry Pi, we’ve featured one recently that you can check out.

RasPi Doorbell

Raspberry Pi Doorbell Is Fully Featured

February 22, 2015 by 37 Comments

When you think of a doorbell, you typically don’t think of anything very complicated. It’s a button that rings a bell inside your home. That’s about it. [Ahmad] decided he wanted to turn his doorbell up to eleven (Google Doc) with this build. Using a Raspberry Pi, he was able to cram in loads of features.

When the doorbell button is pressed, many different events can be triggered. In the demo video, [Ahmad] shows how his phone receives a text message, and email, and a tweet. The system can even be configured to place a voice call via Google Hangouts using a USB microphone. [Ahmad] demonstrates this and shows how the voice call is placed almost instantly when the button is pressed. This may be a bit overkill, but it does demonstrate many different options depending on your own needs.

For the hardware side of things, [Ahmad] purchased a wireless doorbell. He opened up the ringer unit and hooked up the speaker wires to a couple of pins on the Raspberry Pi through a resistor. The doorbell unit itself is powered off of the 3.3V supply from the Pi. The Pi also has a small LCD screen which shows helpful information such as if the Internet connection is working. The screen will also display the last time and date the doorbell was pressed, in case you weren’t home to answer the door.

On top of all of that, the system also includes a Raspberry Pi camera module. This allows [Ahmad] to take a photo of the person ringing the doorbell as a security measure. He can even view a live video feed from the front door by streaming directly to YouTube live. [Ahmad] has provided a link to his Pi image in the Google Doc so others can use it and modify it as they see fit. Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Doorbell Is Fully Featured” →