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If you live in a house that has more people than washrooms you have probably come across the situation where you are waiting for one to free up. Sven has come up with a solution, use a microcontroller to capture usage information and graph it so that you can see what the typical usage patten is like! Have a look at the recent graphs for some additional details. "This project is about nearly daily statistical analysis and reporting of loo usage. Ever wanted to know when is the best time to go to the bathroom?
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Driving motors from a microcontroller will be required for a project eventually. This video by NerdKits will go over some of the basics that are needed. Thanks Humberto. "Electric motors are a key way of converting electrical power (voltage and current) into mechanical power (torque and speed), and because electric motors are simple and reliable machines, they can be found all over, in many different shapes and sizes. In this video tutorial we’re just going to address the electrical side of the system. This includes some experiments you should try with a DC motor, a model of the system from an electrical perspective, building a MOSFET-based switching circuit, and finally two demos of a microcontroller-operated motor. This video and webpage specifically addresses a brushed DC motor, and although the specifics are not fully applicable to brushless (BLDC) motors, stepper motors, or AC motors, the big ideas about motor modeling and control will be useful in those areas as well." |
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If you have some top secret into that needs to hide in plain sight have a look at this USB Cigar. When the cigar is together there is no sign that it has been hacked! "Materials:
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I need one of these robots to make me some coffee in the morning! Even though I a sure there was lots of prep prior to each mini scene this robot is actually very strong and flexible! Thanks for sending it in Alex. |
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When working with a microcontroller there are never enough pins to do the job. Sure you can move up to a hundred pin microcontroller and call it a day but you will have to pay a huge price for that chip, instead it is generally better to pass off the IO complexity to another chip. In this project Oscar uses the Micrel MM5450 is doing the heavy lifting when it comes to controlling the individual pixels of the 8X8 matrix. "I have used an Arduino Nano board with a LED 8×8 Matrix to show a simple text scroller." 
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ElectronicsNerd shows us how to reverse engineer an IR remote control signal. By understanding what type of signal is being transmitted out of the remote control allows a microcontroller to simulate the code to control the Hampton Bay Air Conditioner. "In the NEC protocol, the initial start pulse prepares the receiver IC for a data transmission at a particular rate, adjusting its AGC circuitry for the signal level excursions of what is to follow. After the standard 9ms equalization pulse, there’s a 4.5ms pause, and the receiver then accepts data at a predefined baud rate. If one weird spike were to occur at a particular moment during the transmission, the air conditioner might turn off instead of lower the setpoint temperature of the unit, without a means for detecting glitches in a transmission. Simple error checking like this provides for disallowing invalid input, while providing near-failsafe transmission of valid control data."
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This is a bed shaking alarm clock on steroids! This is even more jolting than my Fire Alarm Bell Alarm Clock! It uses two sources of air, a huge air compressor under the basement stairs and air from the car compressor. A computer controls a valve which starts bed shaking action. See the video below where it is tried out at a radio station. Thanks for the tip Stagueve. |
The goal of this project is to get an overview of the bathroom usage and to get an idea of the loo usage patterns. With the help of statistical analysis it should be possible to get the desired information on a mathematical foundation. For that purpose an electrical switch is attached to the bathroom’s door’s lock. When the door is locked the switch is closed thus closing a circuit and igniting "occupied" lights in the rooms. This information also flows to a microcontroller that registers the status change and writes this information together with a timestamp that comes from a radio controlled DCF77 clock module into a file on a USB storage. This file is being read into a database a web application server is connected with. A CherryPy web application server contains all the the logic to evaluate and report the desired information as flash charts."
