Sunrise, Sunset, Repeat

August 25, 2020 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

Sunrises and sunsets hardly ever disappoint. Still, it’s difficult to justify waking up early enough to catch one, or to stop what you’re doing in the evening just to watch the dying light. If there’s one good thing about CCTV cameras, it’s that some of them are positioned to catch a lovely view of one of the two, and a great many of them aren’t locked down at all.

[Dries Depoorter] found a way to use some of the many unsecured CCTV cameras around the world for a beautiful reason: to constantly show the sun rising and setting. Here’s how it works: a pair of Raspberry Pi 3B + boards pull the video feeds and display the sunrise/sunset location and the local time on VFD displays using an Arduino Nano Every. There isn’t a whole lot of detail here, but you can probably get the gist from the high-quality pictures.

If you wanted to recreate this for yourself, we might know where you can find some nice CCTV camera candidates. Just look through this dystopian peephole.

Thanks for the tip, [Luke]!

Landscape Lighting That Also Texts

September 9, 2016 by Bryan Cockfield 5 Comments

Your local hardware store or garden supply center probably has everything you need to install landscape lighting all around your property. What’s a little less likely is coming out of that situation with fewer holes in your wallet than in your yard. And even then, it’s pretty much guaranteed that any off-the-shelf equipment won’t send you a text message when your landscape lighting isn’t working properly. [Mark]’s landscape lighting system does, though!

Powered by a Raspberry Pi, this landscape lighting system has every feature imaginable. It can turn the lighting on at sunset and turn it off at a set or random time later in the evening. There’s a web interface served from the Pi that allows further user control. The Raspberry Pi also monitors the lighting and can sense when one of the lights burns out. When one does, the Pi uses Twillo to send a text message notification.

There’s not many more features we can imagine packing into a setup like this. Of course, if you don’t have a spare Pi around you can probably manage to get the job done with an ESP8266, or even an old-fashioned Arduino.

The Music Of A Sunset

July 21, 2016 by James Hobson 12 Comments

What would you do if you suddenly went blind and could never again see the sun set? How would you again experience this often breathtaking phenomenon? One answer is music, orchestrated by the sun and the Weather Warlock.

Built by the musician [Quintron] (builder and inventor of insane electronic instruments), the Weather Warlock is an analog synthesizer controlled by — you guessed it — the weather. It translates temperature, moisture, wind and sunlight into tones and harmonics with an E major root chord. UV, light, moisture, and temperature sensors combined with an anemometer set up outside feed the weather data to a synthesizer that has [Quintron] dialing knobs and toggling switches. The Weather Warlock steams 24/7 to the website weatherfortheblind.org so that the visually impaired are able to tune in and experience the joy of sunrise and sunset through music. Continue reading “The Music Of A Sunset” →

Enjoying The Sunrise Every Single Day

July 27, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

[Andy] wanted to take a few at sunrise, but waking up before sunrise has obvious problems associated with it. Instead, he built a device that calculates the local sunrise time, snaps a picture, and goes to sleep until the next morning.

The camera used for the project was an old Canon point and shoot, chosen for the ability to load CHDK firmware. Other electronics included an Arduino pro mini, a LiPo battery and charger board, real time clock, and an old Nokia LCD for the user interface.

There’s quite a bit of code that goes into figuring out when the sun will rise each day, but once that’s figured out, all [Andy] has to do is take the camera somewhere pretty, point it East, and record a few days worth of sunrises. When put into a ‘game camera’ enclosure, its rugged enough to stand up to everything except a thief, and has enough battery power for a few weeks worth of sunrises.

Video demonstrating the local sunrise time below.

Continue reading “Enjoying The Sunrise Every Single Day” →