Cardboard Wall Is Surprisingly Well Built

January 18, 2018 by Adam Fabio 49 Comments

We all built cardboard forts when we were kids. [Paintingcook] has taken it into adulthood with a hand built cardboard wall. He and his wife leased a loft apartment. Lofts are great — one giant space to work with. Plans changed a bit when they found out they had a baby on the way. A single living, working, and sleeping space definitely wouldn’t be good for a newborn, so the couple set about separating a section of the room with a wall.

Sheetrock and steel or wood lumber would be the normal path here. They instead decided to recycle their cardboard moving boxes into a wall. The boxes were formed into box beams, which created the framework of the wall. The two pillars were boxed in and incorporated into the wall itself. The skin of the wall is a random patchwork of cardboard pieces. Most of the construction is completed with 3/8 ” screws and masking tape. Tape won’t last forever, but this is a temporary wall after all.

You might be wondering about fire hazards — sure, cardboard burns more readily than gypsum board, but the apartment is outfitted with sprinklers, which should help on this front. A few commenters on [Paintingcook’s] Reddit thread asked about formaldehyde and other gasses emitting from the cardboard. Turns out he’s an inorganic chemist by trade. He says any outgassing happens shortly after the cardboard is manufactured. It should be safe for the baby.

Cardboard is a great material to work in. You can build anything from robots to computers to guns with it. So get hop the couch, grab that Amazon box, and get hacking!

Solenoids And Servos For Self Actuated Switches

January 18, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 56 Comments

The new hotness in home automation is WiFi controlled light switches. Sure, we’ve had computer-controlled home lighting for literally forty years with X10 modules, but now we have VC money pouring into hardware, and someone needs to make a buck. A few years ago, [Alex] installed WiFi switches in a few devices in his house and discovered the one downside to the Internet of Light Switches — his light switches didn’t have a satisfying manual override. Instead of cursing the darkness for want of an Internet-connected candle, [Alex] did the only sensible thing. He installed electromagnets, solenoids, and servos behind the light switches in his house.

The exact problem [Alex] is trying to solve here is stateful wall switches. With an Internet-connected lamp socket, the wall switch no longer functions. Being able to turn on a light when your phone is out of charge is something we all take for granted, and the solution is, of course, to have Internet-connected switches.

Being able to read the state of a switch and send some data off to a server is easy. For this, [Alex] used a WeMos D1 mini, a simple ESP8266-based board. The trick here, though, is stateful switches that can toggle themselves on and off. This is a mechanical build, and although self-actuated switches that can flip up and down by computer command exist, they’re horrifically expensive. Instead, [Alex] went the DIY route, first installing electromagnets behind the switches, then moving to solenoids, and finally designing a solution around four cheap hobby servos. The entire confabulation stuffed into a 2-wide electrical box consists of two switches, four hobby servos, the D1 mini, and an Adafruit servo driver board.

The software stack for this entire setup includes a NodeJS server connected to Orvibo Smart Sockets over UDP. Also on this server is a WebSocket server for browser-based clients that want to turn the lights on and off, a FauXMo server to turn the lights on and off via an Amazon Echo via WeMo emulation, and an HTTP server for other clients like [Alex]’ Pebble Watch.

This is, without question, the most baroque method of turning a lamp on and off that we’ve ever seen. Despite this astonishing complexity, [Alex] has something that is also intuitive to use and, to borrow an applhorism, ‘Just Works’. With a setup like this, anyone can flick a switch and turn a lamp on or off over the Internet, or vice-versa. This is the best Home Automation build we’ve ever seen.

You can check out [Alex]’ video demo of his build below, or his GitHub for the entire project here.

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Pi Weather Lamp Puts Lava Lamps To Shame

January 14, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 15 Comments

Representing the weather on an LED lamp in a manner that’s easy to interpret can be difficult, but [Gosse Adema]’s weather/matrix lamp makes it not only obvious what the weather is but also offers a very attractive display. For rain, drops of light move downward, and for wind, sideways. The temperature is shown using a range of colors from red to blue, and since he is situated in the Netherlands he needed snow, which he shows as white. A rainy, windy day has lights moving both down and sideways with temperature information as the background.

To implement it he mounted LED strips inside a 3D printed cylinder with reflectors for each LED, all of which fitted into a glass cylinder taken from another lamp purchased online. The brains of it is a Raspberry Pi Zero W housed in the bottom along with a fan. Both the LEDs and the fan are controlled by the Pi. He took a lot of care with power management, first calculating the current that the LEDs would draw, and then writing Python code to limit that draw. However upon measurement, the current draw was much lower than expected and so he resized the power supply appropriately. He also took care to correctly size the wires and properly distribute the power with a specially made power distribution board. Overall, we really like the thorough job he’s done.

But then again, what’s not to like about [Gosse]’s projects. In the area of lighting, he’s dazzled us with WiFi controlled Christmas tree ornaments, but he’s also delighted us with a Prusa i3 based LEGO 3D printer on which he printed LEGO parts and then made a special extruder for printing chocolate.

DIY Bookshelf Is More Than Meets The Eye

January 14, 2018 by Tom Nardi 28 Comments

It might surprise you, Dear Reader, that not every project featured on Hackaday needs to pulsate with LEDs, or update the world about its goings-on over Twitter. They don’t even, contrary to what you may have heard, need to have an Arduino inside. No, sometimes you can pull off a pretty neat hack with nothing more than some wood, a couple of tools, and a unique idea which repurposes something that would otherwise be in a landfill.

Such is the case with the latest project from [Keith Decent], which uses plywood and the spines of old books to create a secret compartment “bookshelf”. The concept is probably best described as a roll-top desk on its side, and while the action does appear a little stiff, it scores extra points for how easy it looks to replicate.

Using a router, [Keith] cuts a channel into the top and bottom sheets of plywood, which the “books” will eventually ride in. This channel goes around the entire perimeter of the shelf, and it’s important to make it as straight as possible so nothing binds up. To make sure things move through as smoothly as possible, some sandpaper is used to clean-up the inside edges.

The next step is to rip some books apart and salvage their spines. Used books can be purchased for next to nothing at flea markets, so even if you don’t have a home library filled with vintage tomes to eviscerate, it should be easy enough to get your hands on some if you want to build your own version. For sanity’s sake it would seem that books with the same size spines are ideal, so keep an eye out for old sets of encyclopedias and the like.

When the spines are removed from the books, they get glued to individual wooden slats. These slats then have holes drilled in the top and bottom, and standard wood screws driven in to act as “rollers”. Real rollers would undoubtedly make for smoother action, but you can’t beat his method if you’re trying to get it done cheaply and quickly.

The slats are then glued onto a piece of fabric, creating what is referred to as a tambour. The fabric backing links all the slats together and makes it so that pushing and pulling one slat will move them all together as one. The book spine tambour is then inserted in the routed channel, and the back panel of the shelf can be installed to lock it all together.

At this point the project is essentially done, but [Keith] does take it the extra mile by sealing all the book spines and doing some finish work on the shelf to make it look more like a real vintage piece of furniture instead of some scrap plywood screwed together.

If this exercise in woodworking has gotten you interested in the wonderful world of dead trees, you’re in luck. We’ve covered several woodworking projects from the hacker perspective, so you won’t be completely lost.

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3D Print A Home Automation Switch

January 13, 2018 by Al Williams 15 Comments

If you are the kind of person who won’t use cheap Sonoff modules to control AC powered devices, we don’t blame you and you should probably stop reading now. However, if you don’t mind a little exposed AC wiring and you have a 3D printer, you might be interested in the second generation of [530 Project’s] in-wall light switch.

The 3D printed switch fits a standard box and uses the guts of a Sonoff controller. These work with all the popular ecosystems such as Alexa and Google Home. And they are cheap. Like, really cheap. If you already have a 3D printer, even counting the cost of the filament these are going to be a small fraction of the cost of a commercial switch. You can see a video about the device, below.

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Mom, I’ll Be In My Attic Spaceship

January 8, 2018 by Roger Cheng 11 Comments

Most attics sit empty or serve as storage space to keep infrequently used items out of sight. Many of us keep boxes of half-completed abandoned projects there. But some people turn the attic itself into the project: this past Christmas some very lucky children received a spaceship playroom in the attic. [Titospot] shared his project via an Imgur album.

The cramped space lends itself to the theme as real-life spacecraft have never been known for interior spaciousness. The builders are skilled enough at standard home improvement tasks of building out and finishing a room, then they took their step into the unknown by building a control panel for the spaceship. [Titospot’s] caption text reveals some insecurity with his electronics build quality but, hey, we all had to start somewhere! Few of our first electronics projects were as much fun as his spaceship control panel. Packed with buttons and switches that trigger light and sound, it is sure to become the focus of many imaginary adventures to galaxies far, far away.

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3D Printed Wave Lamp Forecasts The Weather

January 6, 2018 by Jenny List 4 Comments

While browsing Thingiverse, [Dushyant Ahuja] found a rather pleasing wave lamp, and since a mere lamp on its own would not quite be enough, he added a means by which his lamp could provide weather alerts by means of changing its color.

It’s fair to say that the wave lamp is not a print for the faint-hearted, and it took him 30 hours to complete. However, it has the interesting feature of not requiring a support or raft. There is also a base for the lamp designed to take a strip of addressable LEDs, and he modified its design to mount a small PCB containing an ESP8266 module and a level shifter chip. The code for the ESP relies on the OpenWeatherMap API, and changes the LED color based on the rainfall forecast.

Casting our minds back a decade, this lamp is reminiscent of the long-departed Nabaztag product, best described as an internet-connected plastic anthropomorphic rabbit that could keep you updated with information such as weather or stock market trends through lighting up and the movement of its ears. It was an overpriced idea tied into a proprietary online back end that was probably well before its time back in 2004. Perhaps repackaged for 2017 with a commodity microcontroller board Nabaztag has finally found its application.

There is a short video showing the color change and an LED animation, which we’ve put below the break.

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