EL wire piping on a party couch

March 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you’ve been putting off that reupholstering project here’s a little incentive to get started. Adafruit now has some electroluminescent wire which is perfect for use as piping. They’ve outfitted a small sofa with the glowing material and we think it looks great whether switched on or not.

The installation process is really quite easy. The EL wire is covered with clear material that provides a continuous tab running the length of the wire. This can be stapled on like you see in the image above, or sewn into a fabric seam. So you could take an existing sofa cover, remove all the stitching, and sew it back together with the EL wire replacing the original piping. The video after the break shows how simple the process is.

This will be a nice complement to that Daft Punk table we’ve been meaning to build. [Read more…]

Filed Under: home hacks Tagged With: ,

Color changing coaster has a built-in drink detector

March 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Robert] put together his own illuminated coasters that know when they hold a drink. They look fantastic, thanks to professionally produced PCBs and a layered, laser-cut acrylic case. They’re much like the pagers given to restaurant-goes who are waiting for tables, but this version is much fancier (and doesn’t include the vibrating/paging feature).

The RGB-LED board is a previous project which was developed using eight surface mount RGB LED modules around a circular board. It uses an ATmega168 paired with an MBI5168 constant-current LED sink driver. The coaster enclosure gave him room for a few more items, like the pair of AA batteries which work in conjunction with a boost converter to power the device. It also houses an IR reflectance sensor which is used to detect the presence of a drink on the coaster. This is important since an on-occupied coaster looks like it would be blindingly bright if there wasn’t a glass to diffuse the intensity of the LEDs.

He mentions that incandescent light bulbs mess with the IR reflectance sensor. But there must be some way to account for ambient conditions with the code, right?

Filed Under: home hacks, led hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

Wireless solar water heater controller ensures hot water every time

March 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

water-heater-controller

[Peter Sobey] had a solar hot water heater installed in his home, which worked great until he relocated his kitchen to a neighboring room. Now a good bit further from the tank, the hot water reaching his sink was tepid at best due to the increased distance and temperature limiting mixer valve in the new heater.

He installed a salvaged solar panel and water tank solely for use in his kitchen, but as the panel was located above the tank, he had to find a way to actively monitor and control the water temperature. His pump and valve system was originally driven with an off the shelf PICAXE-based controller, but he eventually got the urge to add a wireless display and control panel to the mix.

A pair of Arduino Nanos run the show now, one of which resides in the pump controller box, while the other is used in the temperature display box in his kitchen. He uses a set of Bluetooth modules to link the Arduinos together, relaying temperature data and allowing him to send the pump controller manual commands if needed.

He says the system works a treat, and he’s much happier with his homebrew controller than the one he used originally.

Filed Under: arduino hacks, home hacks, wireless hacks Tagged With: , , ,

PushingBox alerts you of your cat's roaming habits

March 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Dogs may be man’s best friend, but cats are certainly a hacker’s best muse. They provide so many ‘reasons’ for projects, like this cat door which [Clement] augmented to monitor the comings and goings of his feline friend (translated). He’s using a web service we hadn’t heard of before called PushingBox to send notifications like Tweets and Emails from the Arduino monitoring that door.

The two white rectangles attached to the cat door in the image above are magnets commonly used for entry door monitoring. Using a pair of them along with reed switches lets the system differentiate between an incoming or outgoing cat. The Arduino is web-connected and running the PushingBox API to manage the notification messages. See a demo of the system in the clip after the break.

This would be a nice addition to the cat door we saw [Dino] build. Of course, if you really want to go all out with the cat hacks the next project should be a GPS tracking collar. [Read more…]

Filed Under: home hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

Reinventing The Clapper with a knock-based home automation controller

March 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Clap On!… Clap Off!… was super awesome when The Clapper came out in the mid-eighties. Now [Mathieu Stephan] is trying to make the concept much more functional. He put together a controller that lets you knoch on walls to control things around the house. It’s called the Toktoktok project and uses small boxes to receive user input and control items like lamps and computers.

A piezo element picks up the noises made by a user. Above [Mathieu] demonstrates how sensitive the element is, picking up scratching and knocking anywhere along this wall and displaying it as a waveform on the computer monitor. Clever processing and filtering of these noises lets the device convert them into different commands. He covers all of this in the video after the break, then demonstrates a bunch of functionality such as waking up and starting audio playback from a computer just by tapping on the coffee table.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the concept. One of our favorites is this door lock which listens for the secret knock. But [Mathieu] is trying to extend the functionality and bring it to a more general market. [Read more…]

Filed Under: home hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

CAN bus for home automation

March 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Here’s one node on the new home automation system on which [Black Rynius] is working. So far he’s testing out the system with just two nodes, but plans to build more as the project progresses. He’s chosen to use the CAN bus for communications; a protocol which is most commonly found in automotive applications.

The biggest plus about using the CAN bus is that it requires just one pair of wires for communications. As you can see, there’s an old doorbell included on this board and he’s hoping to use the existing doorbell wire to connect between nodes. Each unit includes a PIC 18F4580 which has a CAN engine built into it for easy protocol translation. There is also an MCP2551 which handles the transmissions. You can read a bit more about the hardware choices in his breadboarding post.

So far almost everything is working as planned. He’s able to send and receive data between the two boards including temperature from a sensor and time from a DS1305 RTC chip. The one thing that vexes him is that doorbell. It draws too much current for the wall wart that’s powering the board, browning out the microcontroller and causing a reset. That’s not a hard fix and we look forward to more developments in the near future.

[via Dangerous Prototypes]

Filed Under: home hacks Tagged With: , , ,
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