Raspi Notifies You Of Space Station Passes

December 13, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

ISS

A few ~~months~~ years ago, [Liam] funded a Kickstarter for a small desk toy that would tell him when the International Space Station was overhead. [Liam] got a little tired of waiting, so he decided to build his own with a Raspberry Pi and an astronomical computation Python library.

The impressive part of this build is computing where an orbiting object is in the sky given the ISS’ orbital elements. For this, [Liam] is using PiEphem, a library that can compute the positions of the sun, moon, planets, asteroids, and Earth-orbiting satellites given a location and a time. Since the ISS orbital elements change every so often, his software is set up to download an update every week or so.

[Liam] developed a few versions of his space station detector, each with a different display. The simplest uses a few LEDs, either through a LedBorg, Blinkstick, or PiGlow to serve as a notification of when the ISS is overhead. Two more complicated versions use an LCD display or LED matrix to signal when the next ISS pass will occur.

Video demo below.

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Putting A Mac Plus On The Internet

December 13, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

plus

[Jeff] has a Mac Plus, an 8 MHz computer with 4 MB of RAM and a 512×342 1-bit screen. It was his first ‘real’ computer, and like those guys that take Model A Fords out for a Sunday drive, [Jeff] decided to put this old box on the Internet.

A Plus has a few options to get on the Internet. The best, but most expensive, is a SCSI to Ethernet computer. For a somewhat slower connections, a PowerPC mac can be used as an Ethernet to Localtalk (the Macintosh serial port networking protocol) bridge. Lacking either of those pieces of hardware, [Jeff] decided to use a Raspberry Pi. The Pi does the heavy lifting, and a handful of serial adapters and voltage converters turns the Pi into something that can talk to the Plus’ serial port.

Even with the MacTCP stack and the MacWeb browser, there are still some things this ancient computer couldn’t do. HTTPS hadn’t been invented until 1994, cookies are just a pain, and CSS is right out. This means modern websites (except, of course, the Hackaday retro edition) simply won’t render properly. To fix this issue, [Jeff]’s friend [Tyler] came up with a Python script using Requests, Beautiful Soup, and Flask to strip out all the Web 2.0 cruft, handle the cookies, and to get rid of SSL.

The end result is a Mac Plus with 4 Megabytes of RAM on the Internet, able to pull up Wikipedia and Hacker News. It isn’t fast by any means – in the video below, it takes about five minutes to pull up the front page of Hacker News – but it is a 27-year-old computer on the Internet.

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Real Life Sonic Screwdriver For Home Automation

December 12, 2013 by James Hobson 11 Comments

Any Doctor Who fans out there? [Pat] just sent us his project on home automation… using a Sonic Screwdriver!

Ever since he pre-ordered his Raspberry Pi at the beginning of February 2012, he knew he wanted to try his hand at home automation. The easy way was to use X10 outlets, but at $20+ an outlet, it’s not that affordable. Instead, he managed to find a rather cheap system on Amazon — RF controlled outlets. They only cost about $35 for a 5-pack!

It’s a very basic system: five outlets with five buttons on the remote. All he had to do was wire up the Raspberry Pi to simulate the button presses by setting the GPIO pins high, and presto, a simple but effective home automation setup.

This is where it starts to get fun. Unfortunately, unlike a real Time Lord, [Pat] didn’t build his sonic from scratch. Instead, he found a universal remote control — styled after [Smith]’s sonic. Add another RF receiver to the Pi, a web-based interface to extend the range, and bam, you’ve got one geeky, but awesome, home automation setup.

Stick around after the break to see it in action!

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Internet-Enabling A Lamp With The Raspberry Pi

December 11, 2013 by Phillip Ryals 30 Comments

[Jack] sent in his writeup for internet enabling a home lamp. While we will certainly have some comments saying this is too simple, it does a great job of breaking things down to the basics. For those that aren’t confident in their electronic skills, this is an easy hack to a commercial device that greatly expands it’s capabilities. [Jack] started with a cheap wireless outlet controller. By opening the remote and wiring each switch to a 2N222A transistor, you can very easily control the remote from the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi. In [Jack’s] case, he set up a web page using Flask that allows quick on/off control.

Of course, this method can be used in any number of instances where you have a wireless controller, from small lamps to garage doors. Given it’s simplicity, anyone can do it with even basic skills. If you’re a beginner who’s been itching to do some home automation, follow [Jack’s] writeup and check an item off your todo list!

Solar Powered, Tweeting Bird Feeder

December 10, 2013 by Phillip Ryals 3 Comments

The folks at Manifold created their version of a tweeting bird feeder, and [Chad] wrote up a behind-the-scenes of their design. The goal is something we’ve seen before: When the bird lands to eat, take a picture and tweet it. In this case, they had some corporate money behind the project, and that allowed them to buy a nice solar panel and battery pack to keep the whole thing running.

The write-up is full of the experimentation that we all enjoy: They found that detecting motion through the camera feed wasn’t reliable, so they switched over to a PIR sensor. The PIR sensor was too sensitive to heat changes during the day, so they went with an ultrasonic rangefinder, but wind caused issues there. They finally came up with a solution which involves using two sensors to confirm motion. This seems a bit more complicated than it needs to be, but it works well for them.

We think it is nice to see companies getting behind quirky projects. All told, they spent dozens of hours on this, and they chose to give all of their findings back to the community in the form of thorough explanations and project diagrams. It would be nice to see more of this.

The weather in Colorado hasn’t been the best lately, so the birdhouse hasn’t been tweeting for a while. In our experience, a project that’s turned off is in the dangerous position of being scavenged for parts. Hopefully that isn’t the case here, and we will see it back in action when Spring starts.

Raspi AC And Blinds Controller

December 7, 2013 by Marsh 10 Comments

raspiBlindsACController

[Chris’s] bedroom has a unique setup with an air conditioning unit perched on the wall next to the top of the blinds that cover his window. Normally, to open the blinds he had to tug on a cord and operating the AC meant fiddling with a remote control. Not anymore. Now [Chris] has an all-in-one Raspberry Pi-based solution to drive both.

The build uses a stepper motor salvaged from a printer to directly drive the blinds, with a familiar-looking Easy Driver connecting it to the Pi. The motor spins the blinds’ mechanism either open or closed, though at a modest pace that’s slow enough to provide the needed torque. [Chris] added an IR diode plugged into the Pi that imitates the air conditioning unit’s remote control, and simply pointed it directly at the unit’s receiver. An inexpensive WiFi dongle gets the Pi onto the network, allowing [Chris] to interact via a custom web interface. The interface itself not only provides a couple of clickable buttons, but a cleverly-designed status image indicating the position of the blinds.

Make sure you see the video below for a demonstration and for more details on the build. This is one of the better examples of home automation devices we’ve seen recently, especially considering it actually fits the “autonomous” implications discussed in our Ask Hackaday post from a few months back—although a relatively simple automation, [Chris’s] interface does allow for operating both the blinds and the AC on a preselected schedule.

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SkyJack: A Drone To Hack All Drones

December 6, 2013 by Marsh 24 Comments

Quadcopters are gradually becoming more affordable and thus more popular; we expect more kids will unwrap a prefab drone this holiday season than any year prior. [Samy’s] got plans for the drone-filled future. He could soon be the proud new owner of his own personal army now that he’s built a drone that assimilates others under his control.

The build uses a Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 to fly around with an attached Raspberry Pi, which uses everybody’s favorite Alfa adapter to poke around in promiscuous mode. If the SkyJack detects an IEEE-registered MAC address assigned to Parrot, aircrack-ng leaps into action sending deauthentication requests to the target drone, then attempts to take over control while the original owner is reconnecting. Any successfully lassoed drone doesn’t just fall out of the sky, though. [Samy] uses node-ar-drone to immediately send new instructions to the slave.

You can find all his code on GitHub, but make sure you see the video below, which gives a thorough overview and a brief demonstration. There are also a few other builds that strap a Raspberry Pi onto a quadcopter worth checking out; they could provide you with the inspiration you need to take to the skies.

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