Water-dosing coffee maker augmentation

[Arthur Benemann] has the worst part of making coffee licked. His add-on for a drip coffee maker fills the water to the proper levels for you, saving the drudgery of rinsing out the carafe, carefully filling it to the appropriate level, then pouring it into the machine without getting everything wet. This isn’t limited to a full pot, but is user selectable by the cup based on how many times in a row you hit that red button. One LED gives feedback on the selected mode, then the device uses a washing machine water valve to turn on the tap for the appropriate amount of time. We’re a little bit leery of connecting homebrew hardware to the water pipes in our house. Make sure you’ve done a good job of debugging so that an infinite loop doesn’t flood you out.

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Building infra red light sources with regular lights

[Oneironaut] sent us another IR hack. This time it is a writeup on the best ways to create IR light sources from regular lights. Since normal flashlight bulbs emit a broad enough spectrum to include visible light and IR light, this basically comes down to filtering. [Oneironaut] explores different light sources and different materials in depth, along with great pictures to show his results. This is a great resource if you’re needing to do some night vision for cheap.

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Weather clock

[Sean_Carney] build this clock that tells the weather instead of the time. The two hands display the current conditions and the temperature. Forty below zero seems amazingly cold if you’re on the Fahrenheit scale but [Sean's] from Winnipeg so he’s operating on the Celsius side of things.

Two servos move the hands to match the data scraped off of the Internet. An Arduino does the scraping with the help of an Ethernet shield. This reminds us of the Harry Potter clock that tells a persons location.

[via Flickr]

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Steampunk Nixie clock

This single-digit Nixie clock is a thing of beauty. You might hate Steampunk or you might love it, but you have to respect projects where the design gets equal (or more) consideration compared to the function. The electronics used in the project build upon an existing single Nixie design. Instead of hiding the guts inside the clock the PCB has been laid out to augment the design. We think [Blue Metal] hit it out of the park with this one!

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Meat smoker from 55gal drums

[Joel] wanted to use his newly acquired welding skills to make something useful. With tasty flesh in mind he put together this meat smoker. What resulted is incredible, but the fact that he then gave it away as a gift is just amazing.

A curved joint between two pipes is known as a ‘fish mouth’. They can be a hassle, as with the pirate wheel project, but [Joel] used his noggin to make things easier. He first modeled two 55 gallon drums in CAD. The intersecting curve was then generated by the software, printed out on paper, and stenciled on the drum to be cut out with a jigsaw.

[Joel's] writeup is greatly detailed and shares many pictures. He makes every part of this smoker, including the wood handles and the stainless steel grates. The guy really knows how to build stuff, but we should have known that after seeing the Crushtoberfest.

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(Yet another) Twitter this controlling Arduino that

Christmas may be over, but we still have a couple of cool holiday related hacks for you. One being [Alpay's] Twitter based interactive Christmas tree ornaments.

We tried to dig up some more information, but it thus far appears a laptop running Processing searches Twitter for specific Christmas related words (like 1337, that’s Christmas-y), sends a buffer to one of three Arduinos which in turn light up a specific ornament. You can check out a live stream here.

For those wanting a bit more information on Arduino and controlling holiday lights, check out [Alpay's] GE health care version of Twitter lights, or our previous post on controlling Christmas trees, or you might even try [Michael's] $10 Walmart light controller.

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Automated car cover

[Mike] covers his car whenever he puts it into the garage because the top is always open. After years of this ritual he decided to upgrade his garage to automatically cover the vehicle. The car cover, made from a few bed sheets, attaches to the bottom of the garage door. At the front of the stall the cover has two half-pound weights sewn in with plenty of padding to protect the car’s finish. Ropes attach to these weights, travel through a pulley system, and connect to the garage door opener carriage. This $65 dollar solution makes sure [Mike's] car is always taken care of.

[Thanks 02TA]

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Choreographed Christmas light show (x4)

[Lucas] is at it again this year. Not satisfied by the computerized systems available on the market, [Lucas] decided to build on last year’s project. To save a bit of cash, he built the setup around Parallax’s low-cost SX28 proto board. The system is capable of controlling 102 channels, with 8-bit dimming. 6 boards control 7 channels each and are communicated to through a serial protocol (reducing the whole setup to only 36 feet of wiring).

More importantly, he’s teamed up with 3 other neighbors who also share a passion for outdoor Christmas lighting and they’ve put together the Christmas Tour of Lights. Money raised from all donations goes directly to the St. Jude Children’s Reasearch Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

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19th century all-in-one PC

…well not quite, but Victorian-styled nonetheless.

In the same vein as his previous creation, [Jake] decided to steampunk his new monitor. However, this time around, he managed to squeeze a full pc into the retro case. A custom aluminum chassis had to be designed and safely house the disk drives and motherboard behind the monitor. Since the 350W PSU was a bit too clunky to mount behind the screen, [Jake] rebuilt the base of the unit around it. The P4, 250GB SATA hard drive, and gold painted cooling fan allow the machine to run Kubuntu “Gusty Gibbon” smoothly. Coupled with a typewriter-inspired keyboard, [Jake's] got a cutting edge antique setup.

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Better temperature readings using an aspirated thermometer

Unlike regular thermometers that can get incorrect readings because of the sun’s heat, shading, and airflow, aspirated thermometers isolate the temperature sensor from precipitation and the sun, while providing constant air circulation. Take ten 1-wire T2SS boards and combine them with DS18B20s and you’ve got yourself the start of an aspirated thermometer. A foot of PVC pipe, fans, and the above mentioned parts and you’ll have accurate temperature readings in no time.

[Dave] made his to control a natural gas boiler, pumps, and 11 gas-fired unit heaters for a combined output of 5.3 million BTUs per hour – keeping his greenhouse nice and toasty.

Update: Thanks Firetech for pointing out our silly typo.

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Social Media HUD

After [Gregg Benjamin] read our story about a simple physical email notifier, he decided to test his skills and add some touches of his own. Rather than limiting his notifier to just email, he has added support for displaying Pandora Radio songs, Facebook notifications, and email all to a LCD. He even has included code for an optional motion detector, as well as support for text message notification. We always love it when our stories inspire our readers to bring their own various solutions to similar problems, so we hope some of you take the code he has supplied (written in python for desktop side, and Arduino sketches for the microcontroller side) and add support for your own interests. Might we suggest RSS feed support, or other social media such as reddit or Google Reader? Let us know if you add something cool, and we might do a follow-up!

[Gregg] doesn’t have a blog of his own, so we have posted the demo video to YouTube, and he has provided all of his related code and images to Megaupload (warning, file is ~115 MB). Sorry to anyone looking for a blog link.

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Solar Water Heater

[Jake] built himself a solar water heater. The system has an 82 gallon insulated water tank and uses a solar collection grid made of PVC pipe. As the water heats, it rises to the top of the collector and runs into the tank while pulling colder water from the bottom of the tank back into the collector.

A sunny day yields temperatures around 130 degrees Fahrenheit. On a cloudy day the water can still be heated to about 90 Fahrenheit. This is about 19 degrees cooler that one might desire but the difference is made up by an electric shower head that heats as the water comes out. [Jake's] system, seen in the video after the break, allows him to forgo the use of electricity on sunny days, and reduce its use by around half on cloudy days. Read the rest of this entry »

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X-mas Hack: 8-channel musical show

We’ve been seeing them appear one house at a time over the last few weeks as Christmas lights are making their annual appearance. Some folks just throw a set of net-style lights on the bushes and call it good but that wouldn’t suit [Noel]. He’s outfitted his house with a show that includes music, 8 controllable light channels, and an Internet interface.

He’s used a plastic toolbox as an enclosure to house everything. Affixed to the base of the enclosure are eight solid state relays for the strings of lights. An Arduino is used to control the SSR switching, playback music through an FM transmitter, and to interface with the wireless bridge.

Rubberneckers can tune their radio to the broadcast frequency and log into the web interface to request their favorite tune or track Santa’s current location. The device even implements VU monitoring to sync the light show with the music. If you want more, watch the video after the break or check out his step-by-step instructions. The Arduino library sure makes the code pulling this all together pretty simple!

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Water the tree – there’s an app for that?

Well no, but [Chris] needed something to remind him when to water the tree. Most folks would use their nifty iPhone to set up a calendar reminder, but why do that when you can purpose a 32 bit microcontroller to do it for you?

To detect a falling water level [Chris] attached a two-pin header to the end of a clothes pin clipped to the side of the tree stand. When the water level is covering the pins it completes a circuit, verified by a measurable current. When the water level drops the mbed microcontroller detects the loss of conductivity and through some creative code sends out an email and SMS reminder.

If you’re in love with your iPhone but not your living things, this will keep that tree kicking until after the new year.

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Homebrew Kodachrome

What do you do if you can’t find the film that your camera uses? The answer seems pretty simple, you just make it yourself. Making film is not a simple task. There are multiple stages involved and it all has to be done in complete darkness. This project is causing a bit of stir in its respective communities. Though not completely finished yet, it is already an impressive piece. Everyone is waiting eagerly for it to be completed. You can find a few of the discussion groups linked from the flickr page.

[via BoingBoing]

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Bulbdial clock kit released

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has just released a Bulbdial clock kit. This has come a long way since their first prototype, featuring three PCBs to carry the 72 charlieplexed LEDs. For accuracy they’ve included an optional header for a ChronoDot precision RTC.

With a great looking face and laser-cut acrylic case available, this may soon adorn our mantle. Time to write that letter to Santa…

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Voice controlled lock? Almost…

If you watched the video before reading the article (like we did) and started shaking in your boots at a voice controlled lock system, prepare to be disappointed. His spoken commands are actually to his son to press the appropriate keys on a keypad off screen, the lock is not actually voice controlled.

But still, [Michael Krumpus'] door lock is pretty astounding. By using a torn apart CD drive he easily attains a nice fast and smooth linear motion to bolt and unbolt his door. It wont open his door like some locks we’ve seen, but it will probably be added sometime in the future…right alongside voice commands.

[via DVICE]

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Cable management for pull-out shelves

Cable management is a headache for all, and if unmitigated it becomes a playground for cats. [kws103] posted a project a while ago that takes care of the messy wires for electronics on pull out shelving. Channel bracket is used to house the cables and has been articulated in three places to facilitate the movement of the sliding shelf. For an added touch an outlet was built into the surface to make it easy to unplug and remove the components if necessary. The hinges for articulation use aluminum base plates and rely on rivets as a pivot point, something that might need improvement if pulling the shelf in and out is a common occurence. Add this to the Ikea based solution we looked at in August and your days of electronic rats nests may be coming to an end.

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Another stationary bike VR rig

[Shingo] shared his implementation of a stationary bike as a virtual reality interface. This is similar to the Google Street View setup we covered a week ago but goes a few steps further. They patched into the bike computer to pick up rotation of the bicycle wheel and added an accelerometer for directional control. This setup can navigate through Street View but the video after the break also details an interface with Google Earth and even the ability to navigate through Second Life, following your avatar as it bikes along with you. The use of a wearable display is far superior to something like the SurfShelf and really gives you a goal other than just some cold-weather exercise. So take this idea, patch it into a wearable computer and you’ve got the exercise setup worthy of the future world we’ve been promised.

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RFID door lock – the right way

[Pcmofo] has shared a well-built, well-explained example of how to implement an RFID key system for a door. We call this the right way because it is well thought out and functional. In the past we’ve seen doors that unlock via a secret knock, keypads, and RFID, but they are all non-permanent solutions capable being transplanted from one door to another. Rather than building a mechanism to turn the door handle, this implementation uses an electric strike mounted in the framing of the door to allow access. These are used for security doors in buildings and are built to keep your door secure.

The hack in this case is the electronics. Using an AVR ATmega168 running the Arduino boot-loader, [pcmofo] has prototyped a two-part design. An RFID reader is mounted outside the door with data wires running to the inside where the microcontroller resides. A hard-coded RFID card is used as a “master” to train any number of tags for entry. The master puts the device in training mode and the next tag to be read is added to the list of tags authorized to open the door.

We like messy wires and quickly thrown together devices but this is built to last and will look great once mounted in an appropriate enclosure.

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