Auto-locking Pet Door Ensures That Your Outdoor Kitty Obeys Its Curfew

April 4, 2012 by 26 Comments

auto-locking-pet-door

If you’ve got a pet that roams freely in and out of your house, you may find yourself wanting to more closely regulate how they come and go. [tareker] was looking to keep his cat indoors at night when dangerous animals might be lurking in the neighborhood, but he didn’t want it to become a hassle.

He already had locking pet door on hand, which he hacked to regulate the egress and ingress of his cat automatically. He installed a pair of reed switches to determine if the door had been opened outwards (cat leaving) or inwards (cat returning), keeping track of the state using an Arduino Nano. A servo motor attached to the door’s frame locks the door whenever it detects the cat is safely inside after nightfall.

While he also added an RGB LED to reflect the status of the door, he’s considering connecting it to the Internet so that he can control and check the door from wherever he might be at the moment.

Your Theme Song Greets You At The Front Door

March 6, 2012 by 16 Comments

One thing you can look forward to when arriving at home after a long, arduous day at the office is some peppy theme music when you walk in the door. [Sebastian Sommer] built the system, and shows it off in the video after the break by dancing to James Brown’s I feel good.

The setup uses an Arduino as a microcontroller. It monitors a hall effect sensor on the jamb which detects a passing magnet on the door. We guess this means the system doesn’t know if you’re coming or going but perhaps a future upgrade would add an infrared beam to detect your legs as head out the door. The music itself is played by an SparkFun MP3 shield which has a decoder chip, microSD slot, and audio jack for the powered speakers. [Sebastian] grabbed a copy of [Bill Porter’s] mp3 shield library to get the project up and running quickly.

This is a pretty cool addition if you’re already using an Arduino for a door lock or vice versa. Or maybe you’re not home enough to make this hack worth it, in which case you simply must take this music playing Tesla coil hat along on your commute.

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Monitoring And Controlling Your Garage Door From Afar With An IP Camera

March 1, 2012 by 41 Comments

remote-control-garage-door

Last year, [Mark Simonelli’s] wife asked him if he could design something that would allow her to remotely check if their garage door had been left open. [Mark] jumped at the chance to tinker with electronics and designed a system around an old TrendNet IP camera. When remotely connected to the camera using IP Cam Viewer Pro for his Android phone, [Mark] could watch the video stream and also trigger the garage door opener via a small relay circuit he built.

His remote opener worked well, but his camera unfortunately lacked any sort of IR vision/low light capabilities. Since his camera wasn’t very useful in the dark, he decided that he needed to add some way to trigger a light when remotely monitoring his garage. He figured the best way to do this would be to control a power strip-connected light using a circuit similar to the one he built to open the garage door itself.

He stopped by the hardware store and picked up a cheap power strip, disassembling it and removing the power toggle once he got home. He fitted it with a small 5v relay, which he connected to the camera’s terminal block. While he admits that it might not be the absolute safest solution, he can easily control both the light and the garage door with a simple swipe of his phone’s screen.

Continue reading to see his remote controlled power strip in action, and be sure to swing by his site to see more details about his camera-controlled garage door opener.

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WiFi Garage Door Opener Makes Forgotten Keys A Thing Of The Past

January 31, 2012 by 23 Comments

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[Tod’s] daughter has a habit of forgetting to take a house key along with her, so he was looking for a way to make accessing the house easier in a pinch. He had tried wireless garage door keypads in the past, but their performance was so-so at best. After scouring the market for commercial solutions and checking out the work of other hackers, he decided that he needed to craft a custom solution of his own.

He started shopping around for wireless-enabled microcontrollers and settled on a Roving Networks RN-XV module, which is designed as a drop-in replacement for an XBee. Paired with a 5v to 3.3v power adapter, the RN-XV is nearly all he needed to interface his iPhone with his garage door opener.

The microcontroller has enough GPIO pins to control the garage door, while also monitoring the door’s status using a simple magnet/reed switch combo. A web server in [Tod’s] house takes input from any phone connected to his wireless LAN and relays the open/close commands to the opener. The opener in turn returns status messages to him via the web interface.

We really like the system’s simple design, and as long as [Tod] has turned WPS off at home, he really shouldn’t have to worry too much about unauthorized entry.

Geared System Adds RFID To Regular Door Locks

December 14, 2011 by 13 Comments

[Flowolf] added an auto-locking RFID entry system to his front door. He used our favorite fabrication system, acrylic and threaded rod (we also like to throw in aluminum angle bracket from time to time). The support structure mounts underneath the escutcheon plate for the lockset, keeping the main acrylic sheet flat against the door.

An RFID reader and Arduino run the system, with a button inside to unlock the door. But if power were to fail, you will still be able to get in or out manually. When you are using the electronic system, a stepper motor connected to the geared lock knob by a chain is what grants access, then revokes it again five seconds later. The wire going up out of the this image is for a switch that lets the unit sense when the door is closed.

As shown in the video after the break, you can turn the auto-lock feature off. But we’d like to see an emergency entry feature, like a knock-based lock, because eventually you will leave without your keys!

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Crunching The Numbers: Using Solar Cells Indoors

December 12, 2011 by 27 Comments

[Mathieu] was interested in using more solar cells for his everday electronics. He looked around but couldn’t find much information about using pholovoltaic for small indoor devices. We remember hearing some of the same things from [Dave Jones] in one of his EEVblog installments from a few years ago which looked at solar calculators; the only indoor solar gadget we can think of.

The quest for knowledge was on and [Mathieu] decided to build this indoor solar cell test platform. It’s a stable piece of hardware that allows him to run reliable tests in many different conditions. It’s designed to compare two identical cells. One is charging the Lithium cell, the other is driving a load directly. A second battery powers the platform separately from the solar circuits so that it can be used as a data logger. He collects, dumps, and graphs info from his test runs, then discusses his findings. We won’t spoil it, but the results are not great. Mostly you need sunlight to get real results as it’s just so much more powerful than artificial lighting.

Ethernet Controlled Garage Door

December 5, 2011 by 30 Comments

[Thomas]’ garage door opener is a big old industrial unit, so he doesn’t have the convenience of a remote-controlled garage door opener.  Obviously, this would get annoying after a while, so [Thomas] decided to build an Ethernet enabled relay board so he can open his door with his iPhone.

The build is based around an ATMega328 and a neat little Ethernet controller from Microchip. There are two relays on the board that connect to the Up and Down buttons on the door opener. The board receives UDP packets with instructions like, ‘RELAY 2 ON’ and the door responds accordingly.

Building just one of his boards cost [Thomas] the meager sum of $43. Considering the new Arduino Ethernet board costs around $60, we’re thinking he did a good job here. From the video after the break, we’re seeing that [Thomas] has to hold the button on his iPhone down for the door to go up. We see a few more pins on his AVR, so perhaps v.2 of his board could contain a few headers to attach sensors. Still, it’s a very nice build.

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