Internet Of Things Refrigerator Alarm

September 29, 2014 by Bryan Cockfield 31 Comments

For anyone who gets a late-night craving for anything out of the refrigerator and needs some help in the willpower department, [Claudio] may have the project for you. He has just finished work on a project that sends out an alarm when the refrigerator door opens, alerting others that you’re on the prowl for munchies.

The device uses a light sensor connected to an OpenPicus IoT kit that contains a FlyportPRO Wi-Fi module. When the refrigerator door is opened, the device sends out an email message via a web server, which can be sent to whomever you choose. All of the project’s code and instructions are available on the project site as well.

The project is pretty clever in that no actual interfacing with the refrigerator is required, beyond running a power cable through the seal of the door (although [Claudio] notes that the device will run on a lithium battery as an option). The web server itself can be set up to send out alarms during any timeframe as well, allowing a user to customize his or her nighttime snacking window. If you’re looking for a less subtle approach, we’d recommend the fridge speakers with a volume setting of 11.

Can An 8 Node Raspberry Pi Cluster Web Server Survive Hackaday?

November 5, 2013 by Adam Fabio 50 Comments

Plenty of folks have used their Raspberry Pi as a web server. [Steve] however is the first 8 node load balanced pi cluster server we’ve run into. While we have seen pi clusters before, they’ve never been pressed into service as a public facing web server. [Steve] has created a really nice informative website about the Raspberry Pi, and Linux in general. As his page views have increased, he’s had to add nodes to the server. Currently [Steve] sees about 45,000 page views per month.

At first glance it would seem that the load balance system would be the weak link in the chain. However, [Steve] did realize that he needed more than an Pi to handle this task. He built the load balancer using an old PC with 512MB of RAM and a 2.7GHz x86 CPU. The most important thing about the balancer is dual network interfaces, one side facing the internet, the other facing the Pi cluster. The balancer isn’t a router though. Only HTTP requests are forwarded. The Pi nodes themselves live on their own sub net. Steve has run some basic testing with siege, however nothing beats a real world test. We figured a couple of links in from Hackaday would be enough to acid test the system.

LED Tells You When Your Server Has Melted

February 11, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 37 Comments

LED

One of the benefits of writing for Hackaday is the ability to command at will a legion of readers to descend on unsuspecting web servers. Most of the time a server can handle the load of thousands of connections. On the rare occasion, though, a server is turned into a pile of slag and dross to the satisfaction of us here at Hackaday and to the ire of admins everywhere.

Checking to see if your server is still running or not isn’t terribly interesting, though. [Eric] thought it would be cool to have a proper physical visualization of how busy his server is, and ended up using a blink(1) USB-controllable LED to display his current server load.

The blink(1) is a small, USB controlled RGB LED that can be used as a universal indicator light. [Eric] had the idea of plugging it in to one of his servers and having the brightness of the LED change in response to the load on the server. He did this with a Python script that queries the Google Analytics API and returns a value from 0 to 255 in response to how popular his server was in the last 10 minutes.

Of course, there’s always a chance Hackaday could Slashdot his server. In that case, the blink(1) glows a steady red, alerting [Eric] to his popularity.

Hackaday-proofing Your Hackerspace’s Server

October 6, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

Last month we posted a tutorial from Hub City Labs on making your own PCBs at home. At the time, Hub City was hosting their hackerspace web site on a tiny vps graciously provided by a member. As you might expect, the throngs of Hackaday readers turned Hub City Labs’ server into a pile of molten slag and made their admin’s hair a little more gray. Their web site is up again, and Hub City provided a tutorial on protecting your server from the ravages of being Slashdotted, Farked, Reddited, and even Hackaday’d.

The solution for the first few hours was to transfer Hub City Labs’ site to an Amazon EC2 instance. Since then, they’ve moved over to a Debian EC2 instance that is able to handle half a million pageviews an hour for a WordPress site.

This amazing capability required a good bit of optimizations. A WordPress installation is set to run cron tasks on every page load; not good if you’re going to see thousands of hits every minute. The guys added define(‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, true) to their wp-config.php file and set all the background tasks – checking to see if a page should be updated – to a fixed schedule every minute or so. Along with an increase in the WordPress cache, these optimizations increased the number of pageviews an hour from 1500 to 60000.

To get up to half a million pageviews an hour, the EC2 instance was loaded up with Varnish, a front-end cache that really speeds things up.

The result – 375 million pageviews for $15 a month – is more than Hub City Labs will probably ever need. The nature of hackerspace web sites, though – light load until Hackaday, Slashdot, or Reddit figure out you did something cool – means hosting on an expandable EC2 instance is probably the way to go.

Lightweight Web Server Using The MSP430

July 17, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

Need a tiny web server? [Rob] over on the 43oh forums made an Ethernet booster pack for the very popular TI MSP430 microcontroller. If that’s not enough, [Rob] also put together an all-in-one solution with a MSP430 and Ethernet controller that can be powered by a battery. Along with the web server that fits in just 5k of flash, we’re going to say [Rob] has a very good solution for remote sensing and data logging.

For his Ethernet-enabled 430, [Rob] chose to use the WIZnet W5200 Ethernet controller. This chip communicates with the 430 via and SPI interface and has a hardware TCP/IP stack that supports TCP, UDP, and PPPoE, offloading all the low-level stuff off of the 430 and onto the Ethernet controller.

After the break there are a pair of videos of [Rob] showing off his tiny web server. A few neat features include a full memory dump of the 430, as well as a reading the states of all the pins via an HTML page. If you’re looking for a way to collect data over Ethernet, we don’t think you could do better than [Rob]’s tiny 430-based web server. Also, if you’d like to control a few devices over the Internet, [Rob] included a few optoisolators for lights or appliances.

The code is available on the 43oh forum page, but [Rob] says he’ll clean that up and put it in a Git.

Continue reading “Lightweight Web Server Using The MSP430” →

Embedded Linux Meets Arduino With The Rascal Micro

June 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Behold the Rascal Micro. It’s running embedded Linux and has a dual-row of pin headers which probably seem pretty familiar. The idea here is to bring Arduino hardware (ie: shields) to a party with a powerful web server.

The image above is the beta version of the hardware. What’s being shown off in a recent Engadget demo is a version that slides two USB ports in between the barrel jack and the NIC. This makes it easy to jump over to wireless with the use of a USB dongle, or you can figure out what other peripherals you want to include in your project.

The novelty here is that the web server included a built-in editor. So not only can it serve you a webpage to control hardware or display sensor status, but it will let you edit the interface without needing to reflash anything.

The price rings in somewhere around $100-150, and like the popular Raspberry Pi board, you can’t get your hands on it right now.

Building The Backend Of Internet Controlled Devices

May 28, 2012 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

[Adam] and [Jeremy] took on the challenge of designing a system that would make it easy to control appliances from the Internet. We’ve seen the concept many times before; it involves some method of switching mains power and connecting that mechanism to the Internet. This design is both well planned and nicely executed.

We’re always very interested in the power switching for a project like this. It’s good that an approved electrical box houses all of the high-voltage parts in the project. Here a GA8-2B02 solid state relay switches power between the incoming cord and the two outlets. We didn’t get a look in the box, but hopefully there’s a partition between those wires and the low-voltage control wiring which uses a standard 3.5 mm audio jack as an interconnect.

An ATmega644 drives the control signal for the relay. It’s connected via Ethernet cable to the Internet through the use of an ENC28J60 chip which takes care of LAN communications. This is essentially a light-weight web server that will be easy to adapt to receive commands from just about any web-connected sender.

[Thanks Bruce]