Automating household devices with Google Calendar

April 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Shane] is building a new house and wants some, “subtle home automation” as he calls it. His first project is hooking up a small heater to the Internet, and judging from his demo video everything is going swimmingly.

[Shane]’s project is built around an mbed microcontroller that connects to the Internet via an Ethernet connection. The mbed has a temperature controller and a solid state relay to turn the heater on an off; simple enough, but we really like how easily [Shane] connected his project to Google Calendar.

After looking over the Google API, [Shane] was understandably overwhelmed. He figured out that by syncing the mbed’s clock to network time and sending a GET request for one minute in the future, the mbed would always know what was scheduled with a minimal delay.

Now, all [Shane] does to turn on his heater is schedule a time and temperature in Google Calendar. He can do this from across the globe or country and makes for a really slick part of a home automation system.

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Filed Under: Microcontrollers Tagged With: , ,

Short and squat balancing bot is extremely stable

March 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Lauszus] really put together an impressive self balancing robot platform. It is virtually motionless when balancing in place, and that stability is never lost even when motoring across the room.

Part of the success behind this build is the use of quality components. He’s got a really nice set of motors with built-in encoders which give feedback to the balancing system. They work in conjunction with a gyroscopic sensor and PID code to keep the two-wheeled platform upright. An mbed board running 96 MHz provides plenty of computing power for the balancing system. But an Arduino can also be found on board. This was included to facilitate Bluetooth connectivity with the remote control as [Lauszus] didn’t want to port the code he had already written.

The fourteen minute video after the break shares the details behind how the PID controller is tuned and how [Lauszus] implements target angle and a few other factors. Of course he talks about the hardware choices, and demonstrates functionality by driving the bot around using a wireless PS3 controller.

The construction method which uses masonite strips and threaded rod does a good job of protecting the hardware mounted on it. We’re always a bit worried about these bots falling over and some of the projects we see offer little or no protection. Once thing that helps protect against a spill is a piezo buzzer which sounds when the battery is getting low.

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Filed Under: robots hacks Tagged With: , , , , , ,

USB slingshot controller is for the birds

February 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This USB slingshot controller really brought a smile to our faces. Part of it is the delightfully silly promo video you’ll find after the break. [Simon Ford] combined nature and technology to bring this USB-enabled slingshot into existence.

The frame itself is from a branch he found in the Epping Forrest of London. He whittled away the bark, and hollowed out an opening in at the base of the ‘Y’ to receive an accelerometer board. It has a pair of female pin headers to interface with the mbed seen in the image above. But the real hack here is the code he wrote to translate accelerometer data into appropriate mouse movements. His success in the area makes this translate the virtual world of Angry Birds in a visceral experience of killing things with a slingshot.

We’re suckers for this type of project. Two examples that pop into mind are these musical instrument hacks for Rock Band 2.

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Filed Under: peripherals hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

Investigating parking assist sensors

February 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

While his wife was out-of-town [James] jumped at the opportunity to do some snooping around with her Chevy Tahoe’s parking assist sensors. We can understand how pulling parts out of someone’s car would make them none too happy. But we find it hilarious that it’s a leased company car he’s tinkering around with. But we’re glad he did, the ten-page write-up he published about the project is a fascinating read.

You can see the control board above which is housed beneath the passenger seat. It uses a Freescale microcontroller to read from the four bumper-mounted ultrasonic sensors. But just looking at what parts are used obviously isn’t enough to satisfy a hacker’s appetite for knowledge. [James] busted out a CAN bus tool to sniff the data packets. These sensors use a custom chip designed by GM, utilizing a single wire communications system. He figures out the communication scheme and builds an mbed based test rig to read them directly.

[via Dangerous Prototypes]

Filed Under: Microcontrollers, transportation hacks Tagged With: , , , ,