[William] sent in this project where he’s using his iPhone to control his TV lift. He’s made a custom PCB with a pic18f122 microprocessor to communicate with the lift. He says it connects to the lift controls via a serial port. You can see a video of it in action after the break. We really think the shadow turning into an arrow is cool. That was a lucky accident.
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has built the bulbdial clock, an idea originated by Ironic Sans. It’s basically a high definition indoor sundial. The LEDs arranged in a circle shine a light on the peg in the middle casting a shadow, just like a sundial. There are 3 colors of rings, allowing for hour, minute, and second shadows. This isn’t the first time that Ironic Sans has seen ideas come to reality. There were the pre pixelated reality show clothes and the sneaky histogram hidden message system. While it is a cute idea, it isn’t really new. People have been patenting this idea for a while.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–BIlxKVCYk]
This speech controlled garbage can was sent in via the tip line by [Amnon]. The garbage can will come to you following a black line and stopping when it sees a cross in the line, then waits for another voice command. It can then return to where it belongs or go outside following the line. The system is based on a microchip PIC 18F4431 and uses three 18 volts cordless drill motors and their batteries as the power source. “In the near future the line sensors will be replaced with UV line sensors and the black line will be replaced with clear UV color.”
When you call the system “Pach Zevel ” (garbage can in Hebrew) the system go to standby and the LED’s light up. After the previous stage if you say “ELAY” (to me in Hebrew) it will drive on the black line till the first crossing.
This adds new meaning to taking the trash out.
[adafruit] wrote in to let us know that the Tweet-a-Watt is now available in kit form. While the plans have been available for a while, a kit is a welcomed addition. The kit doesn’t include the Kill-a-Watt monitor, but rather the XBee adapters and parts necessary to make it talk to your Arduino or computer. The kit is $90, while the Kill-a-Watt can be found for roughly $20.
Reader [Will R] sent in a thermostat mod for his brew fridge. His friends had found a perfectly fine bar refrigerator and wanted to repurpose it for brewing beer. A previous batch of microbrew had been mangled by the Australian heat so they wanted something that could maintain the perfect temperature. The fridge’s built-in thermostat wouldn’t rise above 5 degrees so they had to build their own. [Will] used a 10K NTC thermistor to measure the temperature. It’s connected to an ATtiny25 microcontroller that does the comparison and determines whether to turn on the compressor. He referenced SparkFun’s relay tutorial for the switching side. Although he didn’t etch a board for this project, the design file is included along with all the code on the project site.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PllYYGakjEU]
The creator of the pac man modded roomba is at it again. This time, [Ron Tajima] is going in a completely different direction. He has made a baby cradle attachment for his roomba. We don’t know what safety concerns there might be, but the baby seems OK with, so far. We’ve seen robot baby cribs before, but they cost much much more and don’t clean your house.
In an attempt to create an easier to use interface for the elderly, [Stephen] has put together this phone prototype which uses RFID tags to dial. It is common for our motor skills and eyesight to deteriorate as we get older. There are special phones out there, but generally the only changes they make are enlarged buttons and louder speakers. [Stephen] had the idea to make a system where an elderly person would hold up a picture of the person to the phone and it would dial. He picked up an RFID card reader and an Arduino. The code for the RFID reader was already available, and with minor modifications to prevent multiple swipes from hand tremors or slow movements, he was able to get it working pretty fast. The Arduino then sends the data to an ioBridge to make the call.He’s using Google voice to physically place the call, so you could probably adapt this to other services as well. You can see a video of it in action after the break.
