internet of things

154 Articles

Seven Segment Countdown Timer

Cute Countdown Timer Reminds You Of Impending Doom

August 5, 2015 by 8 Comments

As things get busy, whether it be an upcoming product launch, a pregnancy, or even the release of your favorite game (or movie!) sometimes it’s nice to have a little countdown timer. Not an app on your phone, but a tangible, physical timer to set on your desk. Which is why SevenSeg is such a cute idea.

[Mohit] wanted to design something that was simple, but aesthetically pleasing — he’d seen free-form electronic projects before and wanted to give it a shot. What he came up with is pretty elegant! A seven segment display is connected via 1/32″ brass rods to the controller, a Particle Photon — which is kind of like a Teensy with WiFi for the internet of things. After putting a few resistors in line with the display, and a bit of frustrating bending of wire later, and SevenSeg was complete.

Continue reading “Cute Countdown Timer Reminds You Of Impending Doom” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: Real Time Power Monitoring

August 1, 2015 by 19 Comments

The Internet of Things promises real-time monitoring of appliances, HVAC, and just about everything else in the home. One of the biggest technologies behind this is the smart meter, an electrical meter that will tell you how much power you’re sucking down from the grid at any given moment. A meter need not be smart, though, because [jlbrian7]’s entry for the Hackaday Prize does the same thing without an entirely new meter.

[jlbrian]’s power monitor is a non-intrusive monitor for electrical systems, allowing anyone to retrofit an electrical meter – or just a single breaker panel – with smart meter tech. It uses a small current transformer to monitor the amperage running through a wire. By sending that information to the Internet, anyone with this system gets power monitoring with much higher temporal resolution than what the power company provides in a monthly bill.

As a nice little addition to his Power Monitor, [jlbrian] is adding a few environmental sensors to his data logging platform. This allows for a little bit of interpolation to figure out what all that power is actually being used for; if the power turns on and a few minutes later the temperature drops, there’s a pretty good chance the AC just went on.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Bread Online

Bread Online Is A Bread Maker For The Internet Of Things

July 7, 2015 by 17 Comments

An engineering student at the University of Western Macedonia has just added another appliance to the ever-growing list of Internet enabled things. [Panagiotis] decided to modify an off-the-shelf bread maker to enable remote control via the Internet.

[Panagiotis] had to remove pretty much all of the original control circuitry for this device. The original controller was replaced with an Arduino Uno R3 and an Ethernet shield. The temperature sensor also needed to be replaced, since [Panagiotis] could not find any official documentation describing the specifications of the original. Luckily, the heating element and mixer motor were able to be re-used.

A few holes were drilled into the case to make room for the Ethernet connector as well as a USB connector. Two relays were used to allow the Arduino to switch the heating element and mixer motor on and off. The front panel of the bread maker came with a simple LCD screen and a few control buttons. Rather than let those go to waste, they were also wired into the Arduino.

The Arduino bread maker can be controlled via a web site that runs on a separate server. The website is coded with PHP and runs on Apache. It has a simple interface that allows the user to specify several settings including how much bread is being cooked as well as the desired darkness of the bread. The user can then schedule the bread maker to start. Bread Online also comes with an “offline” mode so that it can be used locally without the need for a computer or web browser. Be sure to check out the video demonstration below. Continue reading “Bread Online Is A Bread Maker For The Internet Of Things” →

DNS Tunneling With An ESP8266

July 1, 2015 by 51 Comments

There’s a big problem with the Internet of Things. Everything’s just fine if your Things are happy to sit around your living room all day, where the WiFi gets four bars. But what does your poor Thing do when it wants to go out and get a coffee and it runs into a for-pay hotspot?

[Yakamo]’s solution is for your Thing to do the same thing you would: tunnel your data through DNS requests. It’s by no means a new idea, but the combination of DNS tunneling and IoT devices stands to be as great as peanut butter and chocolate.

DNS tunneling, in short, relies on you setting up your own DNS server with a dedicated subdomain and software that will handle generic data instead of information about IP addresses. You, or your Thing, send data encoded in “domain names” for it to look up, and the server passes data back to you in the response.

DNS tunneling is relatively slow because all data must be shoe-horned into “domain names” that can’t be too long. But it’s just right for your Thing to send its data reports back home while it’s out on its adventure.

Oh yeah. DNS tunneling may violate the terms and conditions of whatever hotspot is being accessed. Your Thing may want to consult its lawyer before trying this out in the world.

New Part Day: Indoor Location Systems

June 17, 2015 by 86 Comments

GPS is an enabling technology that does far more than the designers ever dreamed. If you want a quadcopter to fly to a waypoint, GPS does that. If you want directions on your phone, GPS does that. No one in the 70s or 80s could have dreamed this would be possible.

GPS, however, doesn’t work too well indoors. This is a problem, because we really don’t know what is possible if we can track an object to within 10cm indoors. Now there’s a module that does just that. It’s the decaWave DWM1000.

This module uses an 802.15 radio to track objects to within just a few centimeters of precision. It does this by sending time stamps to and from a set of base stations, or ‘anchors’. The module is also a small, and relatively high bandwidth (110kbps) radio for sensors and Internet of Things things makes it a very interesting part.

Some of the potential for this module is obvious: inventory management, and finding the remote and/or car keys. Like a lot of new technology, the most interesting applications are the ones no one has thought of yet. There are undoubtedly a lot of applications of this tech; just about every ball used in sports is bigger than 10cm, and if ESPN ever wanted even more cool visuals, just put one inside.

If you’d like to try out this module, decaWave has an eval kit available through distributors for about $600. Somehow, there’s also a Kickstarter for a board that uses the same module, Arduino compatible, of course.

Thanks [Roy] for the tip.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Telling Dad The Stove Is Off

May 26, 2015 by 5 Comments

A month ago, Hackaday landed at the NYC TechCrunch Disrupt, a bastion of people up all night on MacBooks and immense amounts of caffeine and vitamin B12. For 20 hours, everyone was typing away trying to build the next great service that would be bought by Google or Amazon or Facebook. Tucked away in one small corner of the room was the Hackaday crew, giving out dev boards, components, and advice to the few dozen hardware hackers at Disrupt. [David], one of these Hackaday enthusiasts won the Twilio Sponsorship Prize at Disrupt, and now it’s a Hackaday Prize entry.

[David]’s dad has a little bit of paranoia of accidentally leaving the stove on. This usually manifests itself a few minutes after leaving the house, which means turning the car around just to make sure the stove was off. At the TechCrunch hackathon, [David] built a small IoT device to automatically read the temperature of the stove, send that off to the Internet, and finally as an SMS via Twilio.

The hardware [David] is using is extremely minimal – a thermopile, a gas sensor, a WiFi module, and a microcontroller. There’s a lot of iterations in this project, with [David] looking at everything from TI MSP430s to Teensys to Arduinos to ESP8266 modules. Still, rough prototype thrown together in 20 hours is all you need to win the Twilio prize at Disrupt, and that’s more than enough for a very good Hackaday Prize entry.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

globe

Ask Hackaday: The Internet Of Things And The Coming Age Of Big Data

May 18, 2015 by 67 Comments

Samsung has thrown its hat into the Internet of Things ring with its ARTIK platform. Consisting of three boards, each possesses a capability proportional to their size. The smallest comes in at just 12x12mm, but still packs a dual core processor running at 250MHz on top of 5 MB flash with bluetooth.  The largest is 29x39mm and sports a 1.3GHz ARM, 18 gigs of memory and an array of connectivity. The ARTIK platform is advertised to be completely compatible with the Arduino platform.

Each of these little IoT boards is also equipped with Samsung’s Secure Element. Worthy of an article on its own, this crypto hardware appears to be built into the processor, and supports several standards. If you dig deep enough, you’ll find the preliminary datasheet (PDF) to each of these boards. It is this Secure Element thing that separates the ARTIK platform from the numerous other IoT devices that have crossed our memory banks, and brings forth an interesting question. With the age of the Internet of Things upon us, how do we manage all of that data while keeping it secure and private?

What is The Internet of Things?

These kind of terms get thrown around too much. It was just the other day I was watching television and heard someone talk about ‘hacking’ their dinner. Really? Wiki defines the IoT as –

“a network of physical objects or “things” embedded with electronics, software, sensors and connectivity to enable it to achieve greater value and service by exchanging data with the manufacturer, operator and/or other connected devices.”

Let’s paint a realistic picture of this. Imagine your toaster, shower head, car and TV were equipped with little IoT boards, each of which connects to your personal network. You walk downstairs, put the toast in the toaster, and turn on the TV to catch the morning traffic. A little window pops up and tells you the temperature outside, and asks if you want it to start your car and turn on the air conditioning. You select “yes”, but not before you get a text message saying your toast is ready. Meanwhile, your daughter is complaining the shower stopped working, making you remind her that you’ve programmed it to use only so much water per shower, and that there is a current clean water crisis in the country.

This is the future we all have to look forward to. A future that we will make. Why? Because we can. But this future with its technical advancements does not come without problems. We’ve already seen how malicious hackers can interfere with these IoT devices in not so friendly ways.

Is it possible for our neighbor’s teenage kid to hack into our shower head? Could she turn our toaster on when we’re not home? Or even start our car? Let’s take this even further – could the government monitor the amount of time you spend in the shower? The amount of energy your toaster uses? The amount of time you let your car idle?

Clearly, the coming age of the Internet of Things doesn’t look as nice when we lose the rose colored glasses. The question is how do we shape our future connected lives in a way that is secure and private? If closed source companies like Samsung get their IoT technology into our everyday household items, would you bet a pallet of Raspberry Pi’s that the government will mine them for data?

This, however, does not have to happen. This future is ours. We made it. We know how it works – down to the ones and zeros. There is no fate, except that which we make. Can we make the coming IoT revolution open source? Because if we can, our community will be able to help ensure safety and privacy and keep our personal data out of the government’s hands. If we cannot, and the closed source side of things wins, we’ll have no choice but to dig in and weed out the vulnerabilities the hard way. So keep your soldering irons sharp and your bus pirates calibrated. There’s a war brewing.