Posted Jul 21st 2008 8:52AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, home hacks, daily
We're used to central A/C, so we were surprised by
this PIC controller based heater controller. It's based around a pump controlled boiler/radiator system. A PIC 16F84 is used to input the set point and control a pump to circulate the heated water as needed. You can grab full schematics on the
project page.
Update: We added a screen capture of the schematic after the break since the site keeled over.
Continue reading PIC based boiler controller
Posted Jul 20th 2008 7:28AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home hacks, daily
[BahaTanju] sent in this oh so simple
fish feeder. It's a mechanical light timer with a simple dispensing bottle mounted to the rotating time wheel. As the timer rotates, food is dispensed and the aquarium light is activated. If you have bigger fish, you could adapt this to work on a solenoid and use a timer with multiple on/off settings.
Posted Jun 12th 2008 11:30AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home hacks, how-to, daily
Putting a custom designed electronic lock on your space seems like a geek right of passage. For our latest workspace, we decided to skip the boring numbered keypad and build a custom RGB backlit keypad powered by an Arduino. Instead of typing in numbers, your password is a unique set of colors. In today's How-To, we'll show you how to build your own and give you the code to make it all work.
Continue reading How-To: Make an RGB combination door lock (Part 1)
Posted Jun 7th 2008 7:00AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home hacks, daily
If you're thinking of building some DIY home automation,
this looks like an interesting idea. At the heart is a PIC16F84 that decodes IR signals and controls six outputs - in this case, relays to activate various appliances. The PIC is dirt cheap - if you get a deal on some relays you should be able to build a small local IR HA system for $30... This might be just the thing for my office. It's cheap enough that it probably wouldn't walk off.
Posted Jun 4th 2008 10:30PM by Sean Percival
Filed under: home hacks
Beer kegs are several things. They are expensive, heavy, but most importantly delicious. We found a nice guide for creating your own
3 liter beer keg. This is an inexpensive solution for
homebrewers looking to keg their own beer.
The guide goes into detail on assembly and parts needed to create the bottle adapter. Most of the parts can be picked up locally or through
MoreBeer.com. CO2 cartridges are used to pressurize the bottle. To keep everything cool you can use a standard water cooler with a few simple modifications. The 3 liter bottle is too tall for some coolers so you'll need to cut a hole in the lid. Add a piece of aluminum covered styrofoam to the top and bottom, toss in some ice, and your brew should stay cold for about 3 hours.
The author does note that this is not recommended for long term storage. So drink up!
Posted Jun 1st 2008 8:45PM by Sean Percival
Filed under: home hacks
Aside from having a very cool name, parasitic power is an innovate way to recapture already spent power. This power can come in the form of wasted heating or cooling of a building for example. Last week the Southern Methodist University
activated the first commercial Green Machine from
ElectraTherm. The unit recycles residual heat from the building into electricity. So far, the 50kW Green Machine has exceeded expectations. The company also says owners can recoup the units cost after about three years.
Continue reading Parasitic power devices
Posted May 27th 2008 9:30PM by Sean Percival
Filed under: home hacks
Since it happens to be the day after a nice holiday break, many of us are finding ourselves back in front of our desk once again. Perhaps some of you never left it the entire weekend. In any case, it seems fitting to take a look at a few interesting integrated desks we've come across lately. Follow through after the break to see our favorites.
Continue reading The integrated desk
Posted May 12th 2008 10:27AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks, home hacks, daily
In order to tell his home automation system that he's home, [Jim]
mounted a RF transmitter in each of his cars. When the car is on, the transmitter is powered up. The house picks up the transmitter signal when the car arrives or departs. With that information, he was able to set up some stateful rules that can be activated when people arrive or depart. Some people prefer to use
APRS and read vehicle location from the transmitted GPS coordinates, but this is a bit cheaper and doesn't transmit your position to the entire world all the time. The useful range is about 100 feet, so this can work even if you have to park in the street.
Posted Mar 16th 2008 11:27PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, home hacks
A while back, I wrote up
a how-to on some mods I made to my ECM Giotto espresso machine. After giving it some break-in time, I finally wrote up my cheap plumbed in espresso trick. Plumbing kits use a $50 solenoid that requires special plumbing.
My version uses a $12 fridge solenoid, easily adds on to my previous mods, and only requires some tubing size adaptation.
Posted Feb 5th 2008 6:44PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home hacks
Generally, the only time I've ever seen DMX in use is for stage productions. [Dan] sent in
his home light control project - he used a RS-232 to DMX interface and a bunch of commercial DMX dimmers. His light switches were replaced with potentiometers connected to the system via CAT5 cabling. The POTs send 0-10v up the line to the dimmers, and the manual control can override the automated(DMX) settings. The system is simple, robust and responsive - avoiding the delay pitfalls usually incurred by systems like X10.
Posted Dec 26th 2007 11:35PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, home hacks
The arduino is really starting to become prevalent for hardware hacking. [Nash] used one to take control of his Gaggia espresso machine. (They're really decent little machines) He popped in a LCD display, some solid state relays to control the pump and the heating element, and an
AD595 to interface a K type
thermocouple. It looks like an excellent hack, but for the love of god man - get a better grinder!
He describes the original mod
here, and added a small gallery of internal shots
here. From the latest comments, it looks like the guys are
RepRap project are even interested in the thermocouple PID control that [Nash] implemented.
Posted Dec 19th 2007 10:11PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, home hacks
I'm feeling a bit retro for the holidays, so here's another classic: If you've got a non-dimming X10 switch, you've experienced the incredibly loud, obnoxious sound that it makes when you switch it on or off. (Mine's in my stairwell) There's a simple mod to silence the thing: remove the
triac relay and
replace it with a solid state relay. SSRs are a bit expensive, running at least $10 each last time I checked. [Willis Dair] realized that he could
build his own, inexpensive SSR with an optoisolator and an
alternistor(AKA Triac). The resulting circuit runs about $3 in parts.
Posted Oct 24th 2007 10:10PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home hacks
For some reason, computer controllable thermostats are
pretty freakin' expensive. I found a reference to a 1-wire thermostat in
this(
mirror) sample senior project on home automation. It turns out that Dallas Semiconductor put one together a while back as an application for their
TINI platform. (web-application server on a chip). The write-up has since vanished from their site, but I
found it thatnks to archive.org. The thermostat used to run about $50, and a
similar model still seems to be produced. The 1-wire
interface is pretty simple - Maxim's TINI board to control it: not so much. Just using the 1-wire interface with an inexpensive thermostat and controlling from a PC seems pretty viable to me. Just in case, I mirrored the 1-wire interface schematics
here.
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