DIY Smart Home Device Means No More Fumbling In The Dark

July 27, 2016 by James Hobson 24 Comments

Smart home tech is on the rise, but cost or lack of specific functionality may give pause to prospective buyers. [Whiskey Tango Hotel] opted to design their own system using a Raspberry Pi and Bluetooth device connectivity. Combining two ubiquitous technologies provides a reliable proximity activation of handy functions upon one’s arrival home.

The primary function is to turn on a strip of LEDs when [Whiskey Tango Hotel] gets home to avoid fumbling for the lights in the dark, and to turn them off after a set time. The Raspberry Pi and Bluetooth dongle detect when a specified discoverable Bluetooth device comes within range — in this case, an iPad — after some time away. This toggles the Pi’s GP10 outputs and connected switching relay while also logging the actions to the terminal and Google Drive via IFTTT.

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A Grounded Option For The Jet-Setting Homebody

July 15, 2016 by James Hobson 29 Comments

Over the course of 10 years, [Bruce Campbell] has built himself a sleek pad out of a Boeing 727-200 in the middle of the picturesque Oregon countryside.

As you’d expect, there are a number of hurdles to setting up a freaking airplane as one’s home in the woods. Foremost among them, [Campbell] paid $100,000 for the aircraft, and a further $100,000 for transportation and installation costs to get it out to his tract of land — that’s a stiff upfront when compared to a down payment on a house and a mortgage. However, [Campbell] asserts that airplanes approaching retirement come up for sale with reasonable frequency, so it’s possible to find something at a lower price considering the cost of dismantling an airframe often compares to the value of the recovered materials.

Once acquired and transported, [Campbell] connected the utilities through the airplane’s existing systems, as well going about modifying the interior to suit his needs — the transparent floor panels are a nice touch! He has a primitive but functional shower, the two lavatories continue to function as intended, sleeping, dining and living quarters, and a deck in the form of the plane’s wing.

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How To Keep An Unruly Dryer In Line

June 24, 2016 by James Hobson 29 Comments

If necessity is the mother of invention, then inconvenience is its frustrating co-conspirator. Faced with a finicky dryer that would shut down mid-cycle with a barely audible beep if its load was uneven (leaving a soggy mass of laundry), [the0ry] decided to add the dryer to the Internet of Things so it could send them an email whenever it shut itself down.

After opening a thinger.io account, adding the soon-to-be device, and setting up the email notification process, [the0ry] combined the ESP8266 Development Board, a photosensitive resistor, and a 5V power supply on a mini breadboard. All that was left was to mount it on the dryer and direct the LDR (light-dependent resistor) to the machine’s door lock LED to trigger an email when it turned off — indicating the cycle had finished or terminated prematurely. A little tape ensured the LDR would only be tripped by the desired light source.

If you’re an apartment-dweller have WiFi in the wash area it would be awesome to see a battery-powered version you take with you. But in general this is a great hardware blueprint as many device have status LEDs that can be monitored in a similar way. If you want to keep the server in-house (literally in this case) check out the Minimal MQTT series [Elliot Williams] recently finished up. It uses a Raspberry Pi as the center server and an ESP8266 is one of the limitless examples of hardware that plays nicely with the protocol.

We love seeing hacks like this because not only does it conserve water and energy by reducing instances of rewashing, but it’s also a clever way to extend the life of an appliance and potentially save hundreds of dollars in replacing it. Add this to the bevvy of hacks that add convenience to one’s home — some of which produce delicious results.

Turn Down The Bed, Turn Down The Lights

June 19, 2016 by Bryan Cockfield 6 Comments

Home automation seems to be working its way to a computer-controlled future in which humans will be little more than an afterthought. Eventually they will take over Skynet-style, but until then, we will enjoy the relative comfort that a good home automation project provides. The latest from [Clement] certainly goes a long way towards this goal by automating his bed (Google Translate from French).

With four load cells and a microcontroller, [Clement]’s bed can tell whether or not he is sleeping. After taking a weight reading, the bed can send commands to the rest of his home automation system and tell it to turn off his stereo and turn the lights off in the house (or change them to a different color). And it doesn’t stop with just going to bed, but when he wakes up as well. The system can begin turning on lights, starting the coffee machine, and opening the blinds without any interaction from him at all.

This project goes well beyond simple home automation. With a little configuration and extrapolation, [Clement] can tell where in the bed he slept at night, what stages of sleep he was in at specific times, and the overall quality of his sleep. This could go a long way for someone who has a hard time sleeping and needs a little more information on how to correct the problem.

While we’ve seen various takes on tying a bed into one’s home automation system, this one goes above and beyond with the amount of data collected. You could even go one step further and have it turn on some Barry White if the normal weight in the bed suddenly doubles, for whatever reason. Maybe that will be a feature in Version 2.

Small Experiments In DIY Home Security

April 24, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 34 Comments

[Dann Albright] writes about some small experiments he’s done in home security.

He starts with the simplest. Which is to purchase an off the shelf web camera, and hook it up to software built to do the task. The first software he uses is the free, iSpy open source software. This adds basic features like motion detection, time stamping, logging, and an interface. He also explores other commercial options.

Next he delves a bit deeper. He starts by making a simple motion detector. When the Arduino detects motion using a PIR sensor it gets a computer to text an alert. After the tutorial begins to veer a little and he adds his WiFi light bulbs to the mix. Now he can send an email and change the color of the lights.

We suppose, that from a security standpoint. It would really freak a burglar out if all the lights turned red when they walked into a room. Either way, there’s definitely a fun weekend project in playing around with all these systems.

Add Bluetooth To A Cheap Electronic Lock

April 19, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 24 Comments

[James] works from home. His office is filled with objects that can be described with adjectives such as, “expensive,” and, “breakable.” His home, however, is filled with professional object-breakers known as children. To keep these two worlds from colliding, he installed a keypad lock on his office door. The potential side-effect of accidentally training his children to be master safe-crackers aside, the system seems to work so far.

However, being a hacker, the tedium of entering a passcode soon grew too heavy for him. Refusing to be a techno-peasant, he set out to improve his lock. The first step was to reverse engineer the device. The lock is divided into two halves, one has a keypad and handle, the other actually operates the lock mechanism. They are connected with a few wires. He hooked an oscilloscope to the most likely looking candidates, and looked at the data. It was puzzling at first, until he realized one was a wake-up signal, and the other was the data. He then hooked the wires up to a Bluetooth-enabled Arduino, and pressed buttons until he had all the serial commands the door lock used.

After that it was a software game. He wrote code for his phone and the Arduino to try out different techniques and work out bugs. Once he had that sorted, he polished the app and code until he reached his goal. All of the code is available on his GitHub.

Finally, through his own hands, he elevated himself from techno-peasant to wizard. He need but wave his pocket oracle over the magic box in front of his wizard’s lair, and he will be permitted entry. His wizardly trinkets secure from the resident orcs, until they too begin their study of magic.

Home Automation And Monitoring With Edison

April 15, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 9 Comments

[Tyler S.] has built a home automation and monitoring system dubbed ED-E, or Eddie. The name is an amalgam of its two main components, the Edison board from Intel, and some ESP8266 modules.

ED-E’s first job is to monitor the house for extraordinary situations. It does this with a small suite of sensors. It can detect flame, sound, gas, air quality, temperature, and humidity. With this array, it’s probably possible to capture every critical failure a house could experience, from burglars to water pipe leaks. It uploads all this data to Intel’s Analytics Cloud where we assume something magical happens to it.

ED-E can also sense the state of other things in the house, such as doors, with remote sensors. The door monitors, for example, are an ESP8266 and a momentary switch in a plastic case with a lithium ion battery. We’re not sure how long they’ll run, but presumably the Analytic Cloud will let us know if the battery is low via the aforementioned magic.

Lastly, ED-E, can turn things in the house on and off. This is accomplished in 100% Hackaday-approved (if not UL-approved) style with a device that appears to be a lamp cable fed into a spray painted Altoids tin.

ED-E wins some style points for its casing. It’s a very well executed hack, and we’d not previously considered just how many awful situations can be detected with off the shelf sensors.