I’m at the beach this week – finally on vacation. Thanks to DD-WRT, I’ve got a handy wireless repeater to keep the beach house covered with network access. [sprite_tm]’s doing his best to make my vacation easier. He built this knock activated automatic door opener for a friend who wanted easy access to some locked, but empty flat (think british apartment) rooms. He used an ATTINY with some fets to drive the stepper (you can find those in old dot matrix printers for free) and a small transistor amped mic circuit to pick up the knocks. Knock the right code, and you’ll get let right in.
Misc Hacks4181 Articles
Wireless Lightbulb
[atrain] sent in this interesting wireless light bulb. It’s more of a wireless powered LED inside a lightbulb, but you get the idea. A RF signal is recieved by a coil inside the bulb – the AC signal is rectified and used by LEDs to create the light. All the technical details you need to build your own are here.
Steampunk LCD
CNC Solder Paste/pick N Place
Just when I thought I’d seen most of the CNC mods out there, [Steve Ciciora] (who happens to be one of the driving forces behind the killacycle) sent in his diy solder paste dispenser *and* his diy pick and place machine. Both are extensions of his CNC taig mill. Hopefully [steve] will put up some more details of his mill mods.
Energy Efficient Cat Camera
[Juergen] sent in his catcam project built. He used an inexpensive 1.3mp keychain camera with an ATTINY2313. The controller keeps the camera shut down until it’s time to take a picture. Then it powers it up, takes the shot, and returns to low-power mode. The cat adventures are actually kind of interesting. It wouldn’t work from under the car, but anyone feel like gps tracking their cat?
1-wire Servo Controller
This is sort of a follow up to the diy A/C zone control post. It’s a pretty simple circuit, but now they’ve posted schematics for building your own 1-wire controlled servo actuators. It requires external power – so they’re supplying 15v via cat-5/RJ-45s. This isn’t limited to home automation, this could lead to some interesting 1-wire robotics projects.
UK Power Meter Monitor
[john] sent in his version of a power meter monitor. It’s designed to monitor the blinking light on the meter to monitor the current power usage. The light flashes in proportion to the amount of power being used, so it was a matter of using a ldr/photoresistor to capture the output and feed it to the parallel port of his computer. To finish it up, he used a shell script to feed the data into MRTG.
