home hacks

1784 Articles

DIY Wireless Sprinkler System? Don’t Mind If I Do.

September 5, 2017 by 13 Comments

What to do once you have a sprinkler system installed on your property: buy a sprinkler control system or make your own? The latter, obviously.

[danaman] was determined to hack together a cheap, IoT-enabled system but it wasn’t easy — taking the better part of a year to get working. Instead of starting right from scratch, he used the open-source Sustainable Irrigation Platform(SIP) control software — a Python sprinkler scheduler with some features [danman] was looking for(eg: it won’t activate if there’s rain in the forecast). Since he wasn’t running it with a Raspberry Pi as recommended, [danman] wrote a Python plugin that runs on his home server as a daemon which listens to TCP port 20000 for connections and then updates the relevant relays. Ok, software done; on to the relay controller box!

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Have Alexa Open Your Garage Door

September 3, 2017 by 17 Comments

[yoyotechKnows] built an Alexa-controlled garage door opener after his Liftmaster stopped working. Now all he has to do is holler at his mobile phone and he can raise and lower his garage doors at will.

His project is based around a Photon WiFi kit, with a pair of LCC 120 digital relays triggering the two doors, reed switches, and a serial-equipped LCD to display door status, with Alexa, IFTTT, and OpenHab to process the commands. You can find his code in the project writeup.

Currently he has a LCD display informing him of the status of each door, hot glued a reed switch to keep track of whether each one is closed. This might seem a little bit extraneous since he can also just look at the doors from within the garage. However, he’s thinking about putting the display inside his house. But couldn’t he just ask Alexa?

We love us our home automation here at Hackaday, with everything from swimming pools to chicken coops rigged for app control and datalogging.

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Fight Mold And Mildew With An IoT Bathroom Fan

September 2, 2017 by 24 Comments

Delicious sheets of wallboard coated with yummy latex paints, all kept warm and moist by a daily deluge of showers and habitually forgetting to turn on the bathroom exhaust fan. You want mildew? Because that’s how you get mildew.

Fed up with the fuzzy little black spots on the ceiling, [Innovative Tom] decided to make bathroom ventilation a bit easier with this humidity-sensing IoT control for his bathroom exhaust fan. Truthfully, his build accomplishes little more than a $15 timer switch for the fan would, with one critical difference — it turns the fan on automatically when the DHT11 sensor tells the WeMos board that the relative humidity has gone over 60%. A relay shield kicks the fan on until the humidity falls below a set point. A Blynk app lets him monitor conditions in the bathroom and override the automatic fan, which is handy for when you need it for white noise generation more than exhaust. The best part of the project is the ample documentation and complete BOM in the description of the video below, making this an excellent beginner’s project.

No bathroom fan? Not a problem — this standalone humidity-sensing fan can help. Or perhaps you have other bathroom ventilation needs that this methane-sensing fan could help with?

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Living In A Storage Locker Undetected For 2 Months

August 30, 2017 by 143 Comments

A Vancouver man [007craft], also known as [Michael], posted a video on YouTube about his living in a storage locker to save money for an apartment. The small space meant he had to incorporate quite a few little hacks to make living there comfortable.

While probably illegal and almost certainly against the storage locker’s terms of service, it seems you can live quite well in a storage locker if times get tough. [Michael] lived in a U-haul storage locker which cost him around $160 per month complete with bed, bar, living area and kitchen including running water. He goes on to explain how his first problem was electricity, which he had to obtain from an outlet quite a distance from his unit, To do this he just plugged in a large extension cord and cable tied it to the wall so it didn’t look too out-of-place, while for his water supply he used two water tanks, one each for waste and fresh water. Surprisingly he says he only needed to change them over around once a week from a water fountain. He did manage to live there undiscovered for 2 months by keeping out of sight as much as possible.

The video includes quite a few small hacks which try to make the most of the tiny space available and is well worth a watch even if you aren’t planning on living in a storage unit, so check it out below the break.

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Turning On Your Amplifier With A Raspberry Pi

August 27, 2017 by 17 Comments

Life is good if you are a couch potato music enthusiast. Bluetooth audio allows the playing of all your music from your smartphone, and apps to control your hi-fi give you complete control over your listening experience.

Not quite so for [Daniel Landau] though. His Cambridge Audio amplifier isn’t quite the latest generation, and he didn’t possess a handy way to turn it on and off without resorting to its infrared remote control. It has a proprietary interface of some kind, but nothing wireless to which he could talk from his mobile device.

His solution is fairly straightforward, which in itself says something about the technology available to us in the hardware world these days. He took a Raspberry Pi with the Home Assistant home automation package and the LIRC infrared subsystem installed, and had it drive an infrared LED within range of the amplifier’s receiver. Coupled with the Home Assistant app, he was then able to turn the amplifier on and off as desired. It’s a fairly simple use of the software in question, but this is the type of project upon which so much more can later be built.

Not so many years ago this comparatively easy project would have required a significant amount more hardware and effort. A few weeks ago [John Baichtal] took a look at the evolution of home automation technology, through the lens of the language surrounding the term itself.

Via Hacker News.

Stun Gun Vs 220v Mains Electricity

August 19, 2017 by 20 Comments

Those fearless Ukrainians are at it again! This time around they’re giving wall outlets some high voltage stun gun shocks and observing the results, as [Kreosan] decided to see what would happen when you use a stun gun on mains electrical sockets. Surprisingly, they are still alive and well, and creating more videos. .

Shocking a light switch blew up some light bulbs, while shocking an extension cord with a TV plugged in blew the TV up. It seems these guys never run out of appliances to fry, or totally insane experiments to try out that no one else would really have the stomach for.

Although their experiments are on the extreme side of things they do know what they are doing, as they are electrical professionals, So maybe sit this one out unless you too really know what you are doing and understand the risks. The video is below the break for your enjoyment.

We have featured some of their equally scary hacks in the past, like mains voltage EL wire and wirelessly charging your phone from high voltage overhead power lines.

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Fresh-Pressed Clothes Courtesy Of TEO, The Iron Man

August 19, 2017 by 13 Comments

As with many tasks, robots may soon be ironing our clothes for us before we leave for work. Built by a team from the University Carlos III de Madrid’s robotics lab in Getafe, Spain, TEO is a highly articulated robot, that can climb stairs, open doors, and has recently added ironing to its skill set.

Data from a depth-sensing camera in TEO’s head is combed over by an algorithm, breaking it down into thousands of points — 0 being smooth and 1 a defined line in the clothing. Comparing those point values to those of its neighbours allows TEO to identify wrinkles without any preexisting notion of what a freshly-pressed garment looks like.

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