Nyan Cat Built Into The Wall Of A House

November 7, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

You’re going to need your best negotiating skills if you want to convince your significant other to let you add your own Nyan Cat to the kids’ room. This goes a bit deeper than just mounting something on the wall. The LEDs which light up this Nyan Cat installation are actually in the wallboard itself.

Luckily, this is actually a ‘playground for grown-up kids’. [Schinken] and his fellow hackerspace members built it at their location in Bamberg, Germany. It started as a Nyan Cat scarf, which was easy enough to hang on the wall. To make it sparkle they added sixteen LEDs. But you won’t see the wires from either side. A hole was drilled at the location of each diode, with a trench chiseled between them. This makes room for the wires, and was covered with spackle before painting. It turned out to be a pretty simple way to add a focal point to the room, and it certainly has the appropriate level of geekiness for a hackerspace.

Directing An Alarm System Straight To The Internet

October 16, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

[Scott] has a pretty nice alarm system at his house – it will give the operator at his alarm company enough information to determine if it’s a fire alarm, burglary, or just a cat walking in front of a sensor. [Scott] wanted to cut out the middle man and receive notifications from his alarm system on his phone. He did just that, with the help of a trusty Arduino and the very cool Electric Imp.

[Scott]’s build began with an Arduino attach to a Raspi to monitor state changes in the alarm system. Because the designers of the alarm system included a very helpful four-wire bus between the alarm panels and the part connected to the phone line, [Scott] found it fairly easy to tap into these lines and read the current alarm status.

Dedicating a Raspberry Pi to the simple task of polling a few pins and sending data out over WiFi is a bit overkill, so [Scott] picked up an Electric Imp Arduino shield to transmit data over WiFi. We’ve played around with the Imp before, and [Scott] would be hard pressed to come up with a cleaner solution to putting his alarm monitor on the Internet.

Now [Scott] has a very tidy alarm monitor that sends updates straight to his cell phone, no middle man required. A very neat build, and an excellent use of a very cool WiFi device.

Open Source Android Thermostat

October 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 39 Comments

Put that old Android phone to good use by mounting it on the wall as a smart thermostat. This open source hardware and software project lets you replace your home’s thermostat with an Android device which adds Internet connectivity and all that comes with the increase in computing power.

The brunt of the hardware work is taken care of by using an IOIO board which makes it easy to interface any Android device with the simple hardware which switches your HVAC equipment. We’ve been waiting for the launch of the new IOIO design and if it comes in at a lower price as has been rumored that makes this project in the price range of the least expensive of programmable thermostats (assuming you already have an Android device to devote to it). Simply etch your own board to host the relays and voltage rectifier and you’re in business.

There is a client and server app, both free in the Play Store. The server runs on the wall-mounted device with the client offering control via a network connection. The features of the system are shown off quite well in the video after the break.

This sounds like a perfect use for that phone you ripped out of the pages of a magazine.

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Sensor Based Dehumidifier System For Your Home

October 8, 2012 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

The apartment [Angus] lives in must be sealed up pretty tight. It was so humid during the winter that there was a mold issue. We usually have the opposite problem, needing to add humidity to the air in the colder months. To combat the issue he bought a small dehumidifier, but wanted to automate the system a bit more than what was built into its meager controls. He combined a set of wireless sensors and remote control outlets to switch the dehumidifier automatically.

The sensors are from a weather station he bought on eBay. It came with a base station and three remote units, all of which monitor both temperature and humidity. He wanted a system that could compare temperature with dew point and make decisions based on a simple look-up table. An Arduino with a custom milled shield reads these measurements from the sensors and feeds them to a router which is running a cron job script every minute. When that script judges the time and weather conditions warrant a change it tells the Arduino to switch the wireless outlet to which the dehumidifier is connected.

Getting A Nest Thermostat To Work In Europe

October 5, 2012 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

[Julian] was really excited to get his hands on a Nest learning thermostat. It’s round, modern design will make it a showpiece in his home, but he knew there would be a few hiccups when trying to take advantage of its online features. That’s because [Julian] lives in Spain, and Nest is only configured to work in North America. But as you can see above, he did a bit of hacking to get it displaying his actual location.

The Nest is web-connected and phones home to the company’s server to handle configuration. Since they’ve made the decision to only support a portion of the world [Julian] had to do a little bit of digging to bend it to his will. He used Wireshark to sniff the packets it was sending. The calls to the company’s server use SSL, but the device also contacts the Weather Underground for data and this is not encrypted. So he was able to intercept that with his router and inject custom information. It’s not a full solution, but he’s part way there.

We’d really like to see what is possible with this device so please send us a link to any Nest hacks of your own.

Honey Bee Temperature Logger Tracks Internal Hive Movement

October 1, 2012 by Jesse Congdon 15 Comments

Apparently bees tend to use different areas of the hive throughout the year. All we know is not to mess with them. [Max Justicz], on the other hand, does exactly that at his high school. He built a whether resistant solar powered multi-point temperature logger to do such things. The logger is designed to track heat movement within the hive throughout the year. Bees can be tracked like this because they generate a good amount of heat, some even use it to kill off predators.

Building weather resistant electronics is no picnic. You have to deal with rubber O rings, cable glands and clunky waterproof connectors. [Max] shows the whole process of mounting the various components into the enclosure. A solar panel feeds an Ardunio Mega, charging electronics, and SD card shield. With a 1GB SD card this bugger is in for a long haul. The 6600mAh battery should keep it running excessively long though. We’d cut the fat a bit though and swap out that Mega for something less power hungry, but going super low power can get a bit fancy. That mega is powerful enough to incorporate every other bee project we have here.

[Max] has yet to install the logger in his high school’s apiary but will update with logs once he can furnish them. We can’t wait to see the patina it develops over the seasons.

Fancy Beer Pong Table Cleans Your Balls

September 28, 2012 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

Beer Pong seems to have been around for some time but it only recently exploded in to a universally known game. But one thing has always bothered us. Who wants to drink the beer into which that grimy little ball has fallen? Leave it to the frat boys at MIT to come up with a solution. Their beer pong table automatically cleans your balls.

Of course the table looks great. It’s outfitted with laser cut felt lettering on the apron, and the top features EL wire highlights. But the two features that really set it apart aren’t hard to spot either. First, there are rain gutters along either side to help catch the spillage. Secondly, that blue ring is actually the input nozzle for the ball cleaner. By pushing the ball through the vinyl sleeve it enters a recirculating liquid cleanser, popping out of the portal on the left a second later. That’s about all the details we have on the system, but you can get a closer look at the inner workings in the clip after the break.

The thing to remember is that these guys NEVER run out of ping-pong balls. They’ve got thousands on hand ever since they built this launcher.

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