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Chicken_Feed_Indicator

DIY Chicken Feed Indicator Tells You When To Feed The Chickens

December 14, 2014 by 5 Comments

While prepping for the upcoming apocalypse, the [prepforshtf] folks had time to design and build an automatic chicken feeder. It’s a very simple design (the best kind) that is made from standard PVC drain pipe. The pipe is positioned vertically and filled with chicken feed. A T-joint at the bottom of the pipe allows chickens to access the food inside. As food is eaten away, gravity pulls more food down to the feeding area.

That sounds pretty straight forward but it quickly became clear that checking the food level was a chore, almost as much as just feeding the chickens everyday. To remedy the requirement to constantly check the food level, the automatic feeder system was taken apart and modified to include a level indicator. Now, inside the 4-inch pipe resides a plate that resembles a butterfly valve.

This plate doesn’t control the flow of feed like a normal butterfly valve would, the feed actually holds the plate in a vertical position until the feed level drops below the plate. Since the plate has a heavier side, it will rotate when the feed no longer holds it in position. A large red pointer was attached to the plate’s axle and, since it is on the outside of the feeder, it allows a clear indication that the feeder needs a refill.

This is a great project that shows that even simple projects can be very beneficial in everyday life. With no electronics or batteries to fail, this feed indicator will certainly be very reliable. No doubt the chickens will be happy. Check this out for a more involved electricity-powered feeder.

EPROM Coffee Table

December 14, 2014 by 22 Comments

Either in need of a coffee table or suffering a severe lack of upscaled electronics, [Darren] just finished up a great build for his living room. It’s a huge, scaled up version of a UV erasable EPROM with an infinity mirror in place of the fused quartz window.

[Darren]’s coffee table was inspired by an earlier build by the geniuses at Evil Mad Scientist. A few years ago, they built a 555 footstool that was scaled up about 30 times its normal size. Even at footstool scale, the 555 is still relatively tiny.

[Darren] is using a similar construction technique by forming the legs of the EPROM out of laminated plywood. Since this build is significantly larger, building the entire device out of solid, laminated plywood would result in an unwieldy and expensive piece of furniture. Instead, [Darren] constructed the legs and sides out of plywood laminations, covering the ends, top, and bottom with plywood panels. The result is a hollow EPROM/coffee table that’s still structurally sound.

If you’re a bit confused after counting the number of pins on the coffee table, you’re in good company. This is technically a scaled-up version of a 16-pin 0.600″ PDIP, something that a quick googling suggest isn’t historically accurate. Maybe there was an EPROM with a 4-bit wide data bus somewhere in the annals of electronics history, but we’re happy with saying that a completely accurate scaled-up ROM would be far too big for [Darren]’s living room.

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An MSP430-based Automatic Fish Feeder

December 8, 2014 by 9 Comments

[Dmitri] wanted to buy an automatic feeding setup for his aquarium, but he found that most off-the-shelf feeders are really inaccurate with portion control. [Dmitri]’s fish is sensitive to overfeeding, so an off-the-shelf feeder wouldn’t get the job done. Since [Dmitri] knows a thing or two about electronics, he set out to build his own microcontroller-based automatic feeding machine.

[Dmitri]’s machine is based around a MSP430 that starts feeding at scheduled times and controls how much food is dispensed. The MSP lives on a custom PCB that [Dmitri] designed, which includes a stepper motor driver and input for an endstop sensor. The board is wired to a stepper motor that advances a small wooden board with a series of holes in it. Each hole is filled with a single serving of food. The board slides along a piece of U-channel, and food drops out of each hole into the aquarium when the hole reaches the end of the channel.

The whole build is very well documented, and [Dmitri] explains each block of his schematic in detail. His firmware is also open-source, so you can build your own fish feeder based off of his design. Check out the video after the break to see the feeder in action.

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Chinese Temperature/Humidity Sensor Is Easily Hacked

December 5, 2014 by 25 Comments

There’s a new piece of electronics from China on the market now: the USR-HTW Wireless Temperature and Humidity Sensor. The device connects over Wi-Fi and serves up a webpage where the user can view various climate statistics. [Tristan] obtained one of these devices and cracked open the data stream, revealing that this sensor is easily manipulated to do his bidding.

Once the device is connected, it sends an 11-byte data stream a few times a minute on port 8899 which can be easily intercepted. [Tristan] likes the device due to the relative ease at which he could decode information, and his project log is very detailed about how he went about doing this. He notes that the antenna could easily be replaced as well, just in case the device needs increased range.

There are many great reasons a device like this would be useful, such as using it as a remote sensor (or in an array of sensors) for a homemade thermostat, or a greenhouse, or in any number of other applications. The sky’s the limit!

A Wooden LED Matrix Coffee Table

December 2, 2014 by 5 Comments

[johannes] writes in with a pretty impressive LED table he built. The table is based around WS2801 serially addressable LEDs which are controlled by a Raspberry Pi. The Pi serves up a node.js-driven web interface developed by [Andrew Munsell] for a room lighting setup. The web interface controls the pattern shown on the display and the animation speed.

[johannes] built a wooden coffee table around the LED matrix, which includes a matte glass top to help diffuse the lighting. An outlet to plug in a laptop and two USB charging ports are panel-mounted on the side of the enclosure, which are a nice touch. The power supply for the LEDs is also inside the enclosure, eliminating the need for an external power brick.

While [johannes] hasn’t written any software of his own yet, he plans on adding music synchronization and visualizations for weather and other data. Check out the video after the break to see the table in action.

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Home Automation Setup Keeps You Informed

December 1, 2014 by 8 Comments

[johannes] wrote in to tell us about his latest project, a home automation setup he named Botman. While he calls it a home automation system, controlling lights and home appliances (which it does wirelessly on 433MHz) is just a small part of its functionality. The front panel of Botman includes a servo which points to laser-etched icons of the current weather. It also has a display which shows indoor and outdoor weather conditions along with the status of public transportation around [johannes]’s house.

Botman is built around an Arduino with an Ethernet shield. The Arduino has very little memory, so [johannes] used the Google Apps engine as a buffer between his Arduino and the JSON APIs of his data sources. This significantly reduces the amount of data the Arduino has to keep in memory and parse.

[johannes] also wrote an Android app that communicates with Botman. The app has buttons for controlling lights in his house and duplicates all the information shown on the front panel. [johannes] also built some logging features into Botman. The temperature readings and other information are uploaded from the Arduino to a Google Docs spreadsheet where he can view and graph them from anywhere. Check out the video after the break to see Botman in action.

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Five Dollar RF Controlled Light Sockets

November 22, 2014 by 46 Comments

This is tens of thousands of dollars worth of market research I’m about to spill, so buckle up. I have a spreadsheet filled with hundreds of projects and products that are solutions to ‘home automation’ according to their creators. The only common theme? Relays. Home automation is just Internet connected relays tied to mains. You’re welcome.

[Todd] over at Fabricate.io found an interesting home automation appliance on Amazon; a four-pack of remote control light sockets for $20, or what we would call a microcontroller, an RF receiver, and a relay. These lamp sockets are remote-controlled, but each package is limited to four channels. Terrible if you’re trying to outfit a home, but a wonderful exploration into the world of reverse engineering.

After cracking one of these sockets open, [Todd] found the usual suspects and a tiny little 8-pin DIP EEPROM. This chip stores a few thousand bits, several of which are tied to the remote control. After dumping the contents of the EEPROM from the entire four-pack of light sockets, [Todd] noticed only one specific value changed. Obviously, this was the channel tied to the remote. No CRC or ‘nothin. It doesn’t get easier than this.

With the new-found knowledge of what each lamp socket was looking for, [Todd] set out to clone the transmitter. Tearing this device apart, he found a chip with HS1527 stamped on it. A quick Googling revealed this to be an encoder transmitter, with the datasheet showing an output format of a 20-bit code and four data bits. This was a four-channel transmitter, right? That’s where you put each channel. The 20-bit code was interesting but not surprising; you don’t want one remote being able to turn of every other 4-pack of lamp sockets.

With all the relevant documentation, [Todd] set out to do the obvious thing – an Arduino transmitter. This was simply an Arduino and a transmitter in the right frequency, loaded up with bit of carefully crafted code. [Todd] also figured out how to expand his setup to more than four lamp sockets – by changing the 20-bit code, he could make his Arduino pretend to be more than one transmitter.

With Arduino-controlled lamp sockets, the world is [Todd]’s oyster. He can add Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth LE, and whatever trendy web front end he wants to have a perfect home automation setup. It’s actually a pretty impressive build with some great documentation, and is probably the cheapest way to add Arduino/Internet-enabled relays we’ve ever seen.