Home Automation With RC Wall Plugs And Raspberry Pi

June 5, 2012 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

[Jake] took some cheap hardware and figured out a way to use it as a huge home automation network. He’s chose a Raspberry Pi board to connect the radio controlled power outlets to his network. He wrote about his project in two parts, the first is hacking the RC outlet controller and the second is using the Raspberry Pi to manipulate it.

These RC outlets are a pass-through for appliances that connect to mains (lamps, consumer electronics, christmas trees, etc). Often the protocol used by the cheap-as-dirt remote is difficult to work with, but [Jake] really hit it out of the part on this one. In addition to simulating button presses for up to fifteen devices on the remote, he replaced the DIP switch package. This lets him change the encoding, essentially allowing the one device to control up to 32 sets of outlets. Theoretically this lets him command 480 devices from the Raspberry Pi. Since that board is a web server it’s just a matter of coding an interface.

Some of the inspiration for this hack came from the whistle-controlled appliance hack.

Retrotechtacular: 7-function Remote Control Color Television

May 25, 2012 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

Ah, the days when a television was a solid piece of furniture. When it comes to moving, we can’t say we miss it. But looking at this wooden TV cabinet with storage for its 7-function remote we can’t help but think that today’s TVs seem more… trivial… when it comes to the layout of the living room.

The promotional video that goes with this model is a gem of a different era. As you probably have heard, this week [Eugene Polley] passed away. He is credited with inventing the first wireless television remote control. It was not nearly as advance as what’s shown in the video after the break. Instead, it used visible light in conjunction with four light sensors at each corner of the CRT screen. You could turn the set on and off, and flip through channels, but sometimes with the right lighting conditions the set would change all by itself. We wonder if you’d ever come home to find the TV has mysteriously flipped itself on?

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Adding Kilometers To A Radio Meant Only For Meters

May 18, 2012 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

The NRF 24L01+ radio transceiver can be found in a lot of wireless project builds. But it’s only meant to work at a range of a few meters. [Achu Wilson] found that he could greatly extend the range by as much as 2 kilometers. All he needed to do was build this high-gain antenna.

He already had an idea of what he wanted to use the RF link for, so a directional antenna is no a problem. He chose a biquad setup with a back reflector, then used NEC2 to model the design and tweak it for the best performance possible. It only took him about two hours to complete the build, and manages a 10 dB gain. Not bad for some wire and a scrap of sheet meta.

This is the same transceiver chip used in the SNES wireless mod. If only we had a really powerful set of binoculars we could play the extremely long-distance game of Mario Kart we’ve always dreamed about.

Electric Imp Connects Projects To The Internet

May 17, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

If you’re planning a build that communicates wirelessly to that ‘Internet of things’ we’ve been hearing about, you might want to check out the Electric Imp. This tiny little card connects your project to the Internet without all the hassle of configuring an embedded wireless device.

Inside the Electric Imp is a good bit of hardware: an ARM CortexM3, and an 802.11b/g/n wi-fi module that will connect to your wireless network automatically. There are also a few pins left over for serial, I2C, SPI and PWM applications.

Instead of manually configuring the DNS and WPA encryption, the Electric Imp does all of this automatically. We have no idea how the Electric Imp configures itself, but we’d bet it’s something along the lines of plugging the SD card-sized Imp into a computer and piggybacking off the computer’s credentials. The Imp also uses a cloud service, but we’ll bet once Imps are out in the wild, you’ll be able to use them with your own network.

The Electric Imp card itself will sell for about $25, but there are also dev kits to turn the Imp into an Arduino-compatible board. If everything goes as planned, the Imp will be released sometime this summer; we’ll probably see a few Electric Imp projects finished before August.

EDIT: [Kevin] over at Electronic Imp wrote in and told us about the configuration process:

We have an iOS and Android app where the user enters their wireless network’s SSID and the password, then they hold the screen up to the Imp. There’s a photosensor in the Imp that picks up the phone’s flashing and configures the device optically, without the need of plugging it in to a computer, setting up a temporary network for config, or any other cumbersome mechanisms.

We’re basically looking at a much cooler version of the Timex Datalink here. Awesome.

Fancy Telemetry Control Display For A Quadcopter

May 7, 2012 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

Most of the quadcopter projects that we’ve seen use a joystick-based control system. This lets you fly the thing around like any RC vehicle. But [Saulius] is augmenting his control system by pulling and displaying telemetry data. It doesn’t really change the way the vehicle is controller, but it lets the craft roam much further away because the operator can watch the computer screen and forego the need for the quadcopter to be within sight.

A Carambola board (also used in this weather station project) is used to provide connectivity. This is WiFi based, which helps us understand the range it can travel. The quadcopter carries a camera, which is shown in the lower right box of the image above. There is also an artificial horizon, and feedback dials which display the telemetry data.

It looks like there’s a satellite view in between those two dashboard widgets. We don’t see anything coming up right now, but it’s possible this is meant to overlay a virtual marker for the aircraft’s position based on GPS data. That last part is really just conjecture though. Catch the 80-second test flight after the jump.

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Monitoring The Status Of A Unisex Bathroom

May 6, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 53 Comments

Years ago, someone at [Chuck]’s job came up with the brilliant solution of an indicator to display if the unisex bathroom is currently vacant, a men’s bathroom, or a women’s bathroom. The old system worked well, but [Chuck] thought it would be a great idea to display the current status of the bathroom on the large TV in the office, saving his coworkers from getting up only to wait in line until the bathroom became vacant.

Like the previous paper sign, [Chuck]’s build has three statuses: a men’s room, a women’s room, and vacant with a manual dial that is turned whenever someone is entering or leaving. The new build vastly improves on the paper-based indicator by using a laser cut indicator on a rotary switch.

The electronics are dead simple; just an XBee and a Explorer USB board. Whenever the switch state is changed, the XBee sends a bit of data off to a mac mini and displays the status on the office TV. It may be funny to our immature sense of humor, but it’s still a very nice project.

Controlling A Propeller Wirelessly With Bluetooth

May 3, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

[Jeff] from Gadget Gangster sent in a great tutorial on connecting a cheap Bluetooth module to a Parallax microcontroller. In addition to getting a terminal to the Propeller up and running from his computer, [Jeff] was able to toggle IO pins and even control servos and Android devices – perfect for your next wireless robot.

Connecting the Bluetooth module to the Propeller dev board was easy enough – just two wires for power and two for transmitting and receiving. The computer side of the setup was easy as well; just entering a Bluetooth passcode. Once that was done, the Propeller could talk to the computer and vice versa.

Of course, without the ability to control pins on the microcontroller wirelessly the build was for naught. [Jeff] wrote a simple blinking LED demo. After that, a servo was connected and the build finished off by connecting to an Android terminal.

Although it’s a relatively simple build, we’ve noticed the Propeller doesn’t get much love around the Internet. While it may not have won the microcontroller holy war, it’s nice to see an underrated mcu getting some attention.