Web-enabled Coffee Maker Over-complicates Your Break Time

December 5, 2011 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

Some think that grinding the beans and filling the coffee maker is part of the coffee-drinking ritual, but [Jamie] isn’t one of them. Instead, he’s been working to make this coffeemaker a web-enabled device. He built it as part of a class project, and has implemented most of what you need to make a cup of Joe automatically.

You can see a small pump attached to the back of the coffee maker. It sucks water from a pitcher (slightly visible to the left of the coffee maker) to fill the reservoir. He experimented with a couple of different water level sensing solutions. His most recent is a PCB with several traces of different length. As those traces are covered by water, a voltage can be read via ADC to establish water level.

He’s using an Arduino and Ethernet shield to add connectivity for the device. The problem is that there aren’t enough ADC pins left on the Arduino to read the water level sensor. Because of this, he added a self-build shield that uses a PIC to do the ADC measurements and push digital data across to the Arduino. A bit complicated, and it doesn’t load the grounds automatically (yet?). But that’s not to say we don’t appreciate complicated coffee hacks.

Ethernet Controlled Garage Door

December 5, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

[Thomas]’ garage door opener is a big old industrial unit, so he doesn’t have the convenience of a remote-controlled garage door opener. Obviously, this would get annoying after a while, so [Thomas] decided to build an Ethernet enabled relay board so he can open his door with his iPhone.

The build is based around an ATMega328 and a neat little Ethernet controller from Microchip. There are two relays on the board that connect to the Up and Down buttons on the door opener. The board receives UDP packets with instructions like, ‘RELAY 2 ON’ and the door responds accordingly.

Building just one of his boards cost [Thomas] the meager sum of $43. Considering the new Arduino Ethernet board costs around $60, we’re thinking he did a good job here. From the video after the break, we’re seeing that [Thomas] has to hold the button on his iPhone down for the door to go up. We see a few more pins on his AVR, so perhaps v.2 of his board could contain a few headers to attach sensors. Still, it’s a very nice build.

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An Iambic Keyer In 5 Minutes

December 5, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

When most people think about a telegraph key, a piece of 1890s tech with a lever that moves up and down comes to mind. These ‘straight keys’ were terrible for telegraphers and led to repetitive stress injuries like carpel tunnel syndrome..Iambic keys came along and move the contacts to a horizontal position. If you ever see a HAM playing with his CW rig, chances are they’re using an iambic key. It’s great, then, that you can build your own iambic key in five minutes using parts you have lying around.

The build [Dimitris] put up is dead simple – just two metal contacts with a pair of 470K pullup resistors. All this connects to three pins on an Arduino. All the micocontroller needs to do is measure the rise time a touch sensor pin when a voltage is applied. If there’s a finger on the pin, the capacitance increases and the rise time is longer. After that, just assign one sensor as ‘dit’ and the other as ‘dah’ and you’ve got an iambic key.

[Dimitris] put all the code for his project up on his blog. His iambic key seems like the perfect project after a tiny Morse trainer. Check out the video of the key in action after the break

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Trying To Measure The Speed Of Light With An Arduino

December 1, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 63 Comments

We know that measuring the speed of light with an Arduino is possible. It’s just that the implementation is hard.

Last month we saw [Udo]’s blinkenlight shield that can be used as a line scan camera. It’s a neat piece of kit, but [Udo] really wants to submit something for the Buildlounge laser cutter giveaway, so he figured measuring the speed of light would be an easy project. If a kid and a chocolate bar can do it, surely it can’t be too hard.

[Udo] hit upon the idea of pulsing a laser pointer and measuring the time of the reflection. Because his blinkenlight shield can be used as a light sensor, all that’s needed is a mirror and a pretty long line of sight. There’s a few problems with the setup though: with the Arduino running at 16 MHz, a photon will travel 19 meters in one clock cycle.

Even with some very clever coding, we’re not really sure detecting an emitted photon is possible at such (relatively) slow clock speeds. We’re thinking [Udo] could source a few hundred meters of optic fiber so the entire experiment could fit on a desk, but feel free to drop a note in the comments if you’ve got a better idea. [Udo]’s demo of his blinkenlight/laser mashup is after the break.

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Custom Massive LED Panel Lights Up The Party

November 30, 2011 by Mike Nathan 12 Comments

giant-led-sign

The guys at BuildLounge wrote us to share a giant LED sign they came across in the submission pile for their “Win a Laser Cutter” contest that’s currently under way. [Stephen Shaffer] helps run a huge party called Fantastic Planet, for which the group typically outsources the lighting arrangements. They got tired of hiring light guys several times a year and built their own mega display for the festivities instead.

The LED sign consists of 1,474 LEDs that output well over 10,000 lumens. The sign was produced for just about $800, which is very reasonable for a display of its size. The whole thing is controlled by a pair of Arduinos paired with 34 MIC5891 shift registers, all mounted on custom designed PCBs that the group produced in-house.

The display looks great, but don’t take our word for it – check out the video below to see it in action.

If you are interested in taking a closer look at how it was built, swing by the build thread to see more details.

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Siri As A Lippy And Sometimes Profane Television Remote

November 30, 2011 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

If the addition of Siri to your iPhone has given you a somewhat-real life companion (and hope that you might not be forever alone) this hack is right up your alley. [Todd Treece] built a hardware fixiture for the living room which bridges the gap between Apple’s new digital assitant and your television.

The box itself is an Arduino with a WiFly shield and the hardware necessary to make it a universal infrared remote control. He mounted it on the underside of his end table, with the IR LED in line-of-sight for the television. Using SiriProxy he’s added functionality that lets you request a channel change either by the name of the network, or the channel number.

As you can see in the video after the break, Siri has some strong opinions on the quality of programming for certain channels. That and contempt for your inability to just change the channel yourself. But this setup does augment your remote control experience by giving you a synopsis of what’s playing right now for the channel you’ve requested.

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Graphical Programming With The Arduino IDE

November 30, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 46 Comments

The Arduino is an excellent first embedded development kit, provides a great introduction to electronics, and has the potential to get children into programming. [David] thinks throwing C at non-programmers isn’t the best way to learn programming, so he developed ArduBlock , a graphical programming language for the Arduino.

We’ve seen a number of graphical, block-based programming languages in our time, most notably Scratch. [David] found a project called OpenBlocks that serves as the basis for Android App Inventor.

[David] forked the OpenBlocks project and started working on his new graphical programming language. ArduBlocks uses the Arduino IDE, so everything possible in C with an Arduino should be possible with ArduBlocks. There’s a lot of thought put into the design of the blocks – the first iteration was far too ‘busy,’ but [David] cleaned it up and made the projects understandable.

For an absolute beginner, we couldn’t imagine anything better. ArduBlocks would be great for children, and we can’t wait to see a proper implementation of ArduBlocks with a touch screen.