Angular Teardrop Camper Includes An Improvised Galley

July 17, 2013 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

This teardrop camper is more about the angles than it is the curves. That makes construction quite a bit easier. But it’s not only the shape that catches our eye. This one’s built to last and has some nice amenities like a built-in sound system and a galley in the rear storage area. The project is quite old, but a good hack like this one is really timeless.

Head on over to the Desert Dawg website for a project overview. This proves to be quite a different build than the teardrop project from last week. The frame of the trailer started it’s life hauling around a boat. The long nose was cut and the cross pieces welded in place to form the final footprint for the camper which is large enough for a queen sized mattress. In addition to comfortable sleeping, the kitchenette revealed when you lift the back hatch will make cooking on the go a breeze.

[Thanks Doug]

Water Heater Controller Automates Garage Doors

July 17, 2013 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

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The black box mounted between two garage doors is actually a water heater controller. The entire assembly is a conglomeration of hacks which [Simon] added to his garage over the last four years. We’ll give you a quick rundown, but the entire story is told in his blog post.

Back when the house was built [Simon] was approached by the contractor who offered to throw in remote control for the garage door rollers for just 1500 Australian Dollars (about $1350 with today’s rates). That sounded quite steep to him. He managed to add his own remote control for about a third of the price. But there were a few missing features. Notably, a lack of a light that comes on when the doors open. He also didn’t like that the button inside the garage was on the motor, which is mounted quite high.

Years later his water heater controller needed a firmware upgrade from the manufacturer. Check this out: they replaced the entire controller rather than flashing the PIC 18F2321 inside. What a waste! But in this case [Simon] snagged the old unit, which included several mains rated relays. He connected one up to a light socket seen above, and outfitted several illuminated buttons on its original enclosure. Now he has the satisfaction of a light that comes on with when the door opens, and shuts itself off after a preset delay.

Now his daughter wants smartphone control. But that’s as easy as hacking a Bluetooth headset.

Simple Bookends Wear Blemishes With Pride

July 16, 2013 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

We have very few books hanging around the house which makes this small attractive assembly quite enticing. It was built by [Eric Whyne] who wanted to make sure the casual observer didn’t think it was store-bought. In choosing wood he tried to find a couple of show pieces with visually appealing flaws like the broken out knot seen on the bookend.

In addition to the blemish, he chose joinery techniques that would show off craftsmanship not generally found on mass-produced goods. And we’d say he succeeded. The rails attach to the end pieces using a mortise and tenon joint with a wedge to hold things tight. It’s similar to how an ax handle is mated with the blade. The mortise gets a bit of a flair, and a slot cut in the tenon is forced to grip that flair using a small wooden wedge. Here’s an in-depth description of this type of joint.

We just have to mention that we endorse his reading selection. Snow Crash and Burning Chrome are among our favorite novels.

Plastic Bottles Funnel Rain Into Rain Barrels

July 15, 2013 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

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This is [Wombling’s] no-cost solution to getting rain from his gutters into a rain barrel. It is literally just a bunch of plastic water bottles chained together. At one end he uses the original cap with some holes punched in it as a sieve.

We like the concept, but find the execution a bit dubious. In heavy rain the holes in the cap will not be able to keep up and we figure your gutters are going to overflow. That may be okay depending on the grade of your landscaping, but those who value keeping their basement dry should avoid this route.

Just a bit of improvement could change all that though. We suggest making the rain barrel the sieve. Add a bowl shape to the lid with a large piece of screen in the bottom to filter out debris. Then form some type of spout on the front side of the lid to channel overflow away from the house.

The amount of waste generated by bottled water has always troubled us, which is part of the reason we featured this. We also liked seeing those plastic bottle skylights, and could swear we featured a floating plastic bottle island built in the ocean but couldn’t find the link. If you know what we’re talking about leave the goods in the comments section.

Gas, Water, And Electricity Monitoring

July 13, 2013 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

From the look of this you can tell that [Jasper Sikken] has some pretty interesting stuff going on to monitor the utilities in his home. But it’s important to note that this is a rental home. So adding sensors to the gas, water, and electric meters had to be done without making any type of permanent changes.

The module above is his own base PCB which accepts an mbed board to harvest and report on usage. His electric meter has an LED that will flash for every Watt hour that is used. He monitors that with a light dependent resistor, crafting a clever way to fasten it to the meter using four magnets. The water meter has a disc that makes one revolution for each liter of water that passes through it. Half of the disc is reflective so he uses a photoreflective sensor to keep track of that. And finally the gas meter has a reflective digit on one of the wheels. The sensor tracks each time this digit passes by, signifying 10 liters of gas used. He also monitors temperature which we’re sure comes in handy when trying to make sense of the data.

[Thanks Stephen]

Web Based Automation Courtesy Of Raspberry Pi

July 12, 2013 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

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This project is a great example of the Raspberry Pi’s ability to eclipse Arduino when it comes to interaction. [Fall Deaf] mentions that he used to use an Arduino board with an Ethernet shield to add extensible interactivity to his project. But this one, which is a home automation lamp project, uses a Raspberry Pi instead. The concepts end up being very similar. But the cost of the hardware is less and the coding work is arguably orders of magnitude easier.

Don’t get us wrong, the hardware is fundamentally different. When you move from Arduino to RPi you lose some I/O pins and the low level control of them isn’t quite as straight-forward. But you also don’t have to program the thing in C. The Linux kernel handles the low level control which means you can write your scripts using Python. Because Python is an interpreted language the testing and debugging is much faster — no need to flash new code, just run the script again.

This project used the RPi GPIO to drive a strip of LEDs which use the WS2801 protocol. The board includes a NIC which makes it a snap to use as a web server. The smart phone controls seen above are served up from the Pi using jQuery. Right now there’s a cord running out of the lamp. But there should be plenty of room to use a screw-in outlet adapter and to hide the RPi and its PSU inside.

The board still has enough juice to drive other automation features too, like acting as a web radio server.

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3D Printed Dispenser Flings Treats At Your Pets

July 10, 2013 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

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If you’re stuck in the virtual world like [Kevin Flynn] you can still make sure your pup is rewarded for good behavior. Just follow [Jwarp’s] design for this Internet connect dog treat dispenser.

We were actually a bit surprised by the demo video. It shows that the compact unit is more than capable of reliably dispensing one treat at a time. It started as a wood prototype which allowed him to tweak how the servo motors worked before laying out all of the 3D parts in Sketch Up. Two motors cooperate to get the job done. The first allows one treat to exit that shoot coming from the center of the hopper. The other stirs the remaining inventory to both position the next treat and loosen any jams.

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