ChronoTune: Listen To Radio By Year, Not By Frequency

April 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

The ChronoTune is a radio that plays sounds from different eras. This project was developed as an entry for the Redbull Creation Challenge by some members of i3Detroit, a hackerspace in the motor city. It allows a user to turn the dial to tune in a new moment in history, but they can also listen in on the present day. They’ll be greeted with the sounds of a tuning radio, followed by music or audio clips common to the period displayed on the dial.

As you know from the last contest entry, each project must use an Arduino to qualify. It reads a rotary encoder attached to one of the knobs on the front of the case. This doesn’t directly move the tuning needle. Instead, it’s attached to the guts of an inkjet printer to move it back and forth. This lets the radio tune itself if need be.

The audio is played from several sources. There is an MP3 module that allows for longer clips, but there are also some ISD voice recorder chip modules that play back shorter clips. If the dial is tuned to present day, an FM radio module tunes in a station over the air.

Having trouble reading that dial? Don’t worry, there’s a simulated Nixie tube display sticking out the top of the case to provide a digital readout of the currently selected time period. Check out the video after the break to see the team walk us through each part of the ChronoTune.

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BlinkM Smart Garage Door Opener

April 28, 2011 by Mike Nathan 9 Comments

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Calling Canada home, Hackaday reader [TheRafMan] has seen his share of bitterly cold winters. He also knows all too well how hard it is to get his cars started in the morning if somebody happens to leave the garage open. After the door was left open overnight for the second time this last winter, he decided that it was time to add an indicator inside the house that would alert him when the garage had not been closed .

Inspired by our BlinkM Arduino coverage a short while back, his circuit incorporates a BlinkM as well as several other components he already had on hand. He disassembled the garage door switch situated in the house and fit the BlinkM into the switch box once he had finished programming it. A set of wires was run to the BlinkM, connecting it to both a power supply located in the garage as well as the magnetic switch he mounted on the door.

The end result is a simple and elegant indicator that leaves plenty of room for expansion. In the near future, he plans on adding an additional indicator strobe to let him know when the mail has arrived, not unlike this system we covered a few months ago.

Stick around to see a quick video demonstration of his garage door indicator in action.

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Be Lazy, And Get Somewhere At The Same Time

April 27, 2011 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

Cruise the beach in comfortable Jamaican style with this motorized hammock. [Stephen Shaffer] and his friends built it for the Red Bull Creation contest which has as its number one requirement, the need to include an Arduino. We’re basically looking at a hammock frame made out of square pipe that has been put on wheels. Watch the video after the break to see the prototyping, construction, and final product. Looks like originally the electric wheelchair base that’s used for propulsion was centered below the hammock. One sharp turn and the rider/operator gets dumped out on the concrete.

The final version includes a couple of wheels that serve as outriggers, keeping the vehicle upright. A PlayStation 2 controller is used for steering and directional control. It’s polled by the Arduino, which then uses servo motors to control the original wheelchair joystick. At least that’s what we were able to figure out by watching the video.

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Data Scraping And Visualization With Python

April 27, 2011 by Mike Nathan 8 Comments

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[Greg] built himself a small indicator dial with his laser cutter, and wanted to use it for visualizing server performance and load information. Before he started using it for server monitoring however, he thought he should test out his data parsing skills on a simpler data set.

Pachube has a wealth of information that can be freely used for whatever project you might have in mind, so [Greg] started looking around for something interesting to track. Eventually he located the data feed for a tanker ship and wired his dial to display the ship’s speed. He uses a Python script to interface with the Pachube API, which is fed to his Netduino board. A servo motor then changes the position of the dial based on the feed’s data. Since large tankers don’t change speed often, the experiment was a bit of a letdown. He searched for a bit and tuned into another feed that tracked wind speed in New Zealand, getting much better results.

His future plans include hooking it directly to his network and eventually using it to monitor his servers…at least once the novelty of tracking random data feeds wears off.

All of his code is available on GitHub, and he is happy to make a gauge for anyone who is interested, though he doesn’t currently list a price.

Server Room Light And Temperature Monitoring

April 27, 2011 by Mike Nathan 10 Comments

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[Jaren] is occasionally forgetful, and frequently wonders if he’s left the lights on in his server room. Not knowing if the lights have been left on drives him nuts until he returns to work the next morning, so he decided he had to do something. He figured it would be easy enough to build a small sensor that would allow him to monitor the status of the overhead lights, but he didn’t want to have his micro controller’s abilities go to waste by performing one simple task. Instead, he laid out plans to add an array of other sensors which will allow him to monitor the room’s temperature, sound levels, as well as the current draw of the servers.

Right now the project is in the beginning stages, but he already has part of his sensor network established. He hooked up a TMP421-based temperature module along with a TEMT6000 ambient light sensor to his Arduino, which displays the data on a small LCD screen he purchased. More sensors are on order, so we should expect to see more progress in the coming weeks.

Hopefully when everything is completed we will see a full set of schematics and code so that anyone can buld their own server room monitoring network from his designs.

Motion Controlled Reddit Vote Sign.

April 27, 2011 by Jesse Congdon 14 Comments

A little while back I attended the largest east coast gathering of folks from the ever popular social news site, Reddit.com. Those of you familiar with Reddit already know that it is all about link aggregation. Users post links to interesting websites and material, and can then vote up or vote down content based on interest or relevance. Through the magical site algorithms original and interesting content is, as implied, aggregated up to the front page. The whimsical nature of this big DC event lead many people to furnish signs of all types based on the culture of the site, internet memes, etc… The signs that really caught my attention were based primarily on the stylistic site layout, blowing up mail icons and other Reddit specific graphics.

The concept of using site graphics gave me the idea of being able to personally vote up or down other peoples’ signs. It was far too easy to just make a cardboard arrow, and I don’t have a color printer. I happened to have a shelved coffee table project involving orange and blue LEDs. Same colors as the arrows! Sweet. To make this project work I would have to work entirely from my project pile, there simply was no time to order anything from the internet. I managed to crank out a functional up/down voting sign in 3 days leading up to the gathering (and the morning of), here is what I did:

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Can Crusher Keeps Track Of Your Recycling Efforts

April 25, 2011 by Mike Nathan 27 Comments

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Instructables user [MRHint] was inspired by his friends’ recycling efforts, and decided to start recycling as well. The one thing he noticed was that they typically had no idea how many cans they had stored up, nor how much their bags of cans weigh. He figured that he could somewhat automate the crushing process while keeping an accurate can count using a handful of electronics and some elbow grease.

He started by designing a can crushing rig that would use an old windshield wiper motor he had sitting around the house. The motor is connected to a pulley, which drives a set of threaded rods connected to his movable crushing panel. When the motor is started, the panel is drawn against a stationary board, crushing the can.[MRHint] also had an unused Arduino hanging around, so he used it to control the crusher as well as keep track of how many times the crusher had been run.

From what we hear the whole setup works pretty well, but as with any project he sees plenty of room for improvement. Future changes may include a more powerful motor and a chain/sprocket setup in place of the belt and pulley he currently uses. Do you have any other suggestions for [MRHint]? Let us know in the comments.