Alarm System Makes Sure Your Moving Truck Doesn’t Get Raided

September 5, 2012 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

When you move you generally load up everything you own into one truck. If your entire life is ever going to get ripped off, this is probably when it’s going to happen. To guard against the threat [Tim Flint] built his own alarm for a moving truck. If someone opens the door on the truck it’ll alert him via text message. Hopefully he’s got an annoying notification sound that will wake him up in time to catch them red-handed.

The setup is simple and shouldn’t distract you too much from your packing and loading. [Tim] connected a proximity sensor to an Arduino board which has its own WiFi module. The entire thing is housed in the black project box seen above and the proximity sensor is pointed at the moving truck door. When the door is opened the Arduino pushes an alert to Twilio which is configured to send him text messages.

The alarm system doesn’t protect from someone stealing the entire truck… that kind of system is an entirely different project.

Tank Router Defends Your Pets?

September 5, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

The guys over at Section9 Hackerspace in Springfield, Missouri just finished building this treaded robot. Despite the juxtaposition of the cat, it really doesn’t defend anything. The project is a reconnaissance robot controlled over the network with video feedback.

The team started off with some lofty goals. They wanted to the robot to be able to climb stairs and to feature a detachable flying portion in order to get a better look at hard to reach places. Cost and complexity are cited as the reasons they ditched the idea of the flyer. The rest of the features came out much as planned. The motor controller for the treads is connected to an Arduino. This uses an Ethernet shield to connect to the WRT54G router which is also coming along for the ride. This seems a bit over-powered but it makes it easy to connect the webcam on the front (also via Ethernet).

On the software side they wrote an Android app. It controls the movement of the robot, as well as that of the camera. Of course you need to see where you’re going so they went the extra mile to include video from the webcam. Check out their show-and-tell video after the break.

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Hands On With The Electric Imp

September 4, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 33 Comments

A while ago we caught wind of the Electric Imp, a very cool little device that packs an ARM microcontroller and a WiFi adapter into an SD card. We got our hands on an Imp last week, and now it’s time to show off what this little device can do. You can check out the rest of this hands on tutorial with the Electric Imp after the break.

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Arduino WiFi Shield Available, Costs $85 USD

August 21, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

Over on the Arduino blog, the release of the official Arduino WiFi shield was just announced. On the spec page for this WiFi shield. we can see this new board isn’t a slouch; it’s powered by a 32-bit ATMega 32UC3 microcontroller, has provisions for WEP and WPA2 encryption, and supports both TCP and UDP with the Arduino WiFi library. It also costs €69/$85/£55 from the Arduino store.

Now that the announcement of the Arduino WiFi shield is over with, we’ll take this opportunity to go through a few other WiFi adapters for the Arduino that don’t cost an arm and a leg.

The WiFly shield – available from Sparkfun – is a WiFi adapter with the same form factor as the ever popular XBee modules. Of course, it’s possible to make your own breakout board; the WiFly only needs a TX, RX, power and ground connection to connect your Arduino project to the Internet.

We’ve seen a few projects use the WiShield from async labs. It’s a WiFi module packaged in the familiar Arduino shield form factor, and costs $55 USD.

For the hardcore hackers out there, you could always get a bare Microchip WiFi module and get it to work with an AVR as [Quinn Dunki] attempted to. In all fairness, [Quinn] was trying to de-Arduinofy the WiFi library; if you’re cool with Arduino code swimming around in your project, this method will probably work.

There’s also the very, very cool Electric Imp. Basically, it’s an SD card with a built-in WiFi module. After configuring the Imp by holding it up to patterns flashing on your smartphone screen, this device serves as a transparent bridge to the magical ‘cloud’ we’ve been hearing about. The Electric Imp was supposed to have been released in late July/early August, and we’ll put a post up when this cool device actually launches.

Of course we’re neglecting the simplest solution to getting WiFi running on an Arduino project: just use a wireless router. Really, all you need is a pair of TX and RX pins and a copy of OpenWRT. Easy, and you probably have the necessary hardware lying around.

We’re missing a few methods of Arduinofying a WiFi connection (or WiFying an Arduino…), but we’ll let our readers finish what we started in the comments.

Seeing Through Walls Using WiFi

August 11, 2012 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Turns out you don’t need to be Superman to see through walls. Researchers at University College London have developed a way to passively use WiFi as a radar system. Unlike active radar systems (which themselves send out radio waves and listen for them to echo back), passive radar systems cannot be detected.

The system is small enough to fit in a briefcase, and has been tested through a one-foot-thick brick wall. It can detect position, speed, and direction of a person moving on the other side of that wall, but cannot detect stationary object. [Karl Woodbridge] and [Kevin Chetty], the engineers behind the prototype, think it can be refined to pick up motion as minuscule as a person’s rib cage moving with each breath. For some reason we get the picture in our mind of that body scanner from the original Total Recall.

[via Reddit]

[Image Credit]

Getting Connected With Your Home Security System

July 30, 2012 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

This simple device, paired with some creating code will let you become your own home security monitoring service. It’s called the PhantomLink and [Adam] started the project as a commercial venture. He recently decided to go open source with the hardware and will soon be posting a guide on how to program your own web interface too.

We just looked in on a project which takes control of a security panel using an Arduino. The PhantomLink is focused on not just reusing the input hardware, but monitoring the whole system. It sounds like several different protocols are supported.

The DB9 jack is intended for use with an adapter you can wire yourself. Basically just tap into the terminal block on the alarm controller for your house, then route those connections to the proper pins. A PIC 12F683 monitors the alarm system, pushing data via the WiFi module mounted on the board. With that web connection you can do anything you want by catching and formatting the data.

Set Your Arduino Free With Wifino

July 6, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

[Tod] wrote in to tell us about his latest project. It’s called wifino, and aims to set your Arduino free by offering a web-based IDE, online storage for your Arduino sketches, and even WiFi enabled hardware to upload sketches wirelessly.

The wifino was conceived with the same train of thought as the codebender IDE we saw earlier this week. Instead of only providing a web-based programming environment, the wifino works in conjunction with wifino hardware, meaning you can upload sketches over a wireless connection.

On the software side of things, the wifino IDE features code editing, compiling, and uploading right from a browser. There are plans for a github-style interface in the works, allowing for the easy sharing of Arduino sketches from makers around the world.

[Tod] is planning on getting a Kickstarter underway in the next few weeks to get the wifino boards out into the wild. We’ll be sure to keep you updated with any info or specs that come our way.

You can check out [Tod] uploading code from the Windows and iOS clients after the break.

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