Toilet Automatically Flushes For Your Bathroom Trained Kitty

December 16, 2015 by James Hobson 20 Comments

So you’ve successfully taught your cats to use your toilet, just like little furry humans. Congratulations! But you can’t quite teach the cat to pull the flush lever? You might want to automate it for them instead! (Editor’s note, 2019. Link seems to be dead. Try the Wayback Machine.)

[Joycelin & Dan] are in the final stages of teaching their cats to use the toilet. Unfortunately they had a snowboarding trip coming up, and were worried about the cats losing progress when they couldn’t flush the toilet for them. Rather than have a bit of a setback in their toilet training, they improvised — and automated the toilet.

There are commercial solutions available, but they cost several hundred dollars. You could strap a geared motor to the side of your toilet with a stick screwed to it like this guy did, but who wants to pay for the water bill of flushing your toilet every few minutes??

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Small-farm Automation Keeps Livestock Safe And Happy

December 15, 2015 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

Life down on the farm isn’t easy, and a little technology can go a long way to making things easier for the farmer. It’ll be a while before any farmer can kick back on the beach and run his place from a smartphone, but that’s clearly the direction things are heading with this small farm automation project.

[Vince]’s livestock appears to consist of chickens and sheep at this point, and the fact that they share housing helped him to deploy some tech for both species. The chickens got an automated door that lets them out in the morning and shuts them in safely once they’ve returned to roost for the night – important protection against predators. The door is hoisted by a Somfy window-treatment motor, which seems a little on the overkill side to us; a thrift-store electric drill and a homebrew drum might have worked too. A Teensy with an RTC opens and closes the door according to sunrise and sunset times, and temperature and humidity sensors provide feedback on conditions inside the coop. The sheep benefit from a PTZ webcam to keep an eye on their mischief, and the whole thing is controlled by a custom web interface from [Vince]’s smartphone.

There’s just something about automating chicken coop doors that seems to inspire hackers; check out this nice self-locking design. As for [Vince]’s farm, it looks like his system has a lot of room for expansion – food and water status would be a great next step. We’re looking forward to seeing where he goes from here.

Spectacular View Of The Eiffel Tower Is All Done With Mirrors

December 14, 2015 by Dan Maloney 57 Comments

What Parisian wouldn’t want an apartment with a view of the Eiffel Tower? Alas, not every window can face the famed landmark, and for some, the million Euro view is tantalizingly out of reach. Such was the case for [Lurluberlu], but with a little optical trickery he was able to peer around a corner to deliver spectacular views of the Eiffel Tower to his bedroom.

[Lurluberlu] devised a simple horizontal periscope using two full-length mirrors. The video after the break shows the build – as a side note, we’re very jealous of his hand tool packed workshop. With some plywood backing and simple swivels, the mirrors were mounted on his window sill to bounce the iconic tower’s image inside. After a little adjustment, the image is perfectly framed by the window, and with the lights off in the apartment, the view from the bed is quite spectacular. Our bet is that it’s quite a bit cheaper than moving to a flat with a better view.

Of course, with a little ingenuity (and a balcony) anyone can have a view of the City of Light. Or anywhere else for that matter.

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Quick Network Bridge Gets Off-grid Home Back Online

December 9, 2015 by Dan Maloney 40 Comments

Off-grid living isn’t for everyone, but it has gotten easier in recent years. Cheap solar panels and wind turbines let you generate your own power, and there are plenty of strategies to deal with fuel, water and sanitation. But the one thing many folks find hard to do without – high-speed internet access – has few options for the really remote homestead. [tlankford01] wants to fix that and is working on an open-source mesh network to provide high-speed internet access to off-grid communities.

But first he had to deal with a major problem. With high-speed access provided by a Clearwire wireless network, streaming content to his two flat-screen TVs wasn’t a problem. At least until Sprint bought Clearwire and shut down the service in early November. Another ISP covered his area, but his house lies in a depression out of line of sight of their tower. So he rigged up a bridge between the WiMAX network and his lab. The bridge sits on a hill in sight of the ISP’s tower 3.5 miles away. Solar panels, a charge controller and deep-cycle batteries power everything, and a wireless link down the hill rounds out the build.

This is obviously a temporary solution, and probably wouldn’t last long in winter weather. But it’s working for now, and more importantly it’s acting as proof of concept for a larger mesh system [tlankford01] has in mind. There are plenty of details on what that would look like on his project page (linked above), and it’s worth a look too if you’re interested in off-grid connectivity.

Herring Bone Bed With Secret Compartment

December 7, 2015 by James Hobson 7 Comments

Why buy a bed when you can make an even fancier one — with a hidden compartment!? After [Vitiello] couldn’t quite find a bed frame he liked, he decided to make his own, using a herringbone pattern for the woodwork.

We’ve shared quite a few awesome home-made kid’s beds lately, like this beautifully hacked IKEA bed (complete with a hidden room!) and this Avenger’s themed Helicarrier bed, featuring a remote control dart turret. So after we got over feeling jealous that we weren’t three feet tall and able to have a bed as awesome as those, we saw this herringbone bed. And while it doesn’t have a hidden room, it does have a pretty awesome secret compartment which helps ease the pain.

Built out of about $250 worth of cedar planks, [Vitiello] did a great job with both the design and build. He purposefully made the headboard rather thick to accommodate an LED lit shelf, and of course, the hidden compartment accessible from the side. And since he could, the LEDs are remote controlled — and of course color changing.

[via r/DIY]

Wireless Water Meter Monitor Watches Waste

December 6, 2015 by Dan Maloney 10 Comments

It’s no secret that hackers like to measure things. Good numbers lead to good decisions, like when to kick your wastrel teenager out of a luxuriously lengthy shower. Hence the creation of this wireless Arduino-based water meter interface.

We’ll stipulate that “wireless” is a bit of a stretch. Creator [David Schneider] chose to split the system into two parts – a magnetometer and an Arduino to sense impulses from the water company meter, and a Raspberry Pi to serve the web interface. The water meter is at the street rather than in his house, so the sensor is wired to the Pi with some telephone cable. But from there the system is wireless.

[David] goes into some good detail on the sensing problem he faced, which relies on detecting the varying magnetic field due to the spinny-bits inside the flowmeter and cleaning up the signal with the Arduino; he also addresses aliasing errors that occur when flow rate approaches the sampling rate of the magnetometer.

We like the fact that there’s a lot of potential to leverage this technique to monitor other processes with rotating magnetic fields. And like this optically coupled gas-meter monitor, it’s not invasive of the utility’s equipment either, which is a plus.

[via reddit]

Smart Coaster Informs You When Your Drink Is Ready

December 4, 2015 by James Hobson 4 Comments

How many times have you made a cup of coffee or tea and it’s been too hot to drink, and then by the time you get to it, it’s become too cold? While very much a #firstworldproblem, [ToniTheAxe] decided to fix it — and enter a contest at the same time. He calls it the µCoaster, and essentially, it is a temperature sensing alarm clock.

The coaster uses a TMP006 infrared temperature sensor which measures the temperature of whatever you place on the coaster indirectly. It also doesn’t use much power. He designed the PCBs around this and created a very nice looking coaster that’s powered off of a button cell battery — he thinks it’ll last for around 6 months with daily usage — though that depends on how bad your caffeine addiction is.

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