PIC18F25K22

3 Articles

Another Kind Of Cloud: The Internet Of Farts

November 16, 2016 by 33 Comments

It’s taken as canon that girls mature faster than boys. In reality, what happens is that boys stop maturing at about age 12 while girls keep going. And nothing tickles the fancy of the ageless pre-teen boy trapped within all men more than a good fart joke. To wit, we present a geolocating fart tracker for your daily commute.

[Michel] is the hero this world needs, and although he seems to have somewhat of a preoccupation with hacks involving combustible gasses, his other non-methane related projects have graced our pages before, like this electrical meter snooper or an IoT lawn mower. The current effort, though, is a bit on the cheekier side.

The goal is to keep track of his emissions while driving, so with a PIC, an ESP8266, a GPS module, and a small LCD display and keyboard, he now has a way to log his rolling flatulence. When the urge overcomes him he simply presses a button, which logs his location and speed and allows him to make certain qualitative notes regarding the event. The data gets uploaded to the cloud every Friday, which apparently allows [Michel] to while away his weekends mapping his results.

It turns out that he mainly farts while heading south, and he’s worried about the implications both in terms of polar ice cap loss and how Santa is going to treat him next month. We’re thinking he’s got a lock on coal — or at least activated charcoal.

Our beef with this project is obvious – it relies on the honor system for input. We really need to see this reworked with an in-seat methane detector to keep [Michel] honest. Until then, stay young, [Michel].

Energy Monitor Optically Couples To Smart Meter

April 24, 2016 by 27 Comments

Hackers love to monitor things. Whether it’s the outside temperature or the energy used to take a shower, building a sensor and displaying a real-time graph of the data is hacker heaven. But the most interesting graphs comes from monitoring overall power use, and that’s where this optically coupled smart-meter monitor comes in.

[Michel]’s meter reader is pretty straightforward. His smart wattmeter is equipped with an IR LED that pips for every watt-hour consumed, so optical coupling was a natural approach. The pulse itself is only 10 ms wide, so he built a pulse stretcher to condition the pulse for a PIC microcontroller. The PIC also reads the outside temperature with a DS18B20 and feeds everything to the central power monitor, with an LCD display and a classic Simpson meter to display current power usage. The central monitor sends the power and temperature data to Thingspeak, along with data from [Michel]’s wood-stove monitor and a yet-to-be-implemented water heater monitor.

[Michel] is building out an impressive suite of energy and environmental monitors for his Quebec base of operations. We’re looking forward to seeing how he monitors that water heater, and to see what other ideas he comes up with.

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IOT Lawnmower

World’s First Internet Connected Lawnmower

June 10, 2015 by 16 Comments

Okay so this IOT is getting a bit out of hand. Introducing the world’s first(?) tweeting, internet connected, lawnmower.

[Michel] recently bought one of those new-fangled cordless lawn mowers by EGO. It runs off a 56V lithium ion battery pack, and apparently, works pretty well. Since it has plenty of on-board power, he decided to strap a 64MHz PIC18F25K22 to a ESP8266 and connect it to the internet. That part number has been taking the world by storm and it’s totally freaking awesome. The ESP8266 is a tiny WiFi module that is controllable over a serial port — and it only costs $5. Hello IOT-everything.

Anyway, to avoid voiding his warranty, [Michel] using non-invasive sensors to collect data — A series of hall effect sensors and magnets to be exact. One detects when the cutting system is engaged, and another magnet and sensor pair counts wheel revolutions. In the end, this gives you data on how far you pushed the mower, how long you spent cutting, and how long you were out there. When the job is done, you have the option to push a tweet with your stats. Woo!

He does admit, the tweeting feature is more there just to annoy his friends.