Planet Arduino

Residential-grade commercial alarm systems are good at a few things but terrible at others, like keeping pace with telephone technology. So what to do when a switch to VOIP renders your alarm system unable to call in reinforcements? Why not strip out the old system and roll your own value-added alarm and home automation system?

Generally, the hardest part about installing an alarm system is running the wires to connect sensors to the main panel, so [Bill Dudley] wisely chose to leverage the existing wiring and just upgrade the panel. And what an upgrade it is. [Bill]’s BOM reads like a catalog page from SparkFun or Adafruit – Arduino MEGA 2560, Ethernet shield, a sound board, stereo amplifier, X10 interface, and a host of relays, transformers, and converters. [Bill] is serious about redundancy, too – there’s an ESP8266 to back up the wired Ethernet, and a DS3231 RTC to keep the time just in case NTP goes down. The case is a bit crowded, but when closed up it’s nicely presentable, and the functionality can’t be beat.

Rehabilitating old alarm systems is a popular project that we’ve covered plenty of times, like this Arduino upgrade for a DSC 1550 panel. But we like the way [Bill] really went the extra mile to build add value to his system.

[Kenbob] is an awesome pet owner. He has two small dogs that have free access to the backyard through a doggy door. It’s great during the day, but they have to close it at night to stop the dogs from bothering the neighbors. So he decided to make an automatic curfew based doggy door!

Before setting out on his project, he determined some design goals that had to be met. Namely, he couldn’t have it lock the dogs outside by accident! The hack makes use of an old large format flat-bed scanner that had stopped working a while ago. As it so happened, this scanner had just enough carriage travel to be able to actuate a cover for the doggy door. After reinforcing the sliding cover, he hooked it up to an Arduino Nano, a RTC and a H-Bridge motor driver in order to control it.

In order to add scheduling ability and to program the door remotely, he has also hooked it into his existing x10 control infrastructure in his house — not too shabby! It also features a manual 3-position switch to lock it open, closed, or to leave it on automatic. The question is, can a raccoon get in?

He’s been testing it for a few weeks and it works quite well, although he admits it is not the most rugged solution — lucky for him, his dogs aren’t the type to run headfirst into things. Stick around after the break to see it in action.

• Arduino Duemilanove 

• Adafruit Protoshield

• ioBridge Serial Smart Board

• x10 Transeiver, Appliance and lamp modules

• 2 Futaba S3003 servos
• Nylon rope

• Parallax PIR sensor
• 2 red LEDs

• 2 1K resistors

• 1 2N2222 tranisistor
• 1 10k resistor

• 125VAC/10A DPDT Plug-In Relay (as a switch combined with x10)
• Styrofoam cooler and dryer hose and Ice to create low laying fog.

• Incandescent black light, strobe light, black light bulbs.

Setup
It's all pretty basic. The arduino controlled the PIR motion sensor, the servos for dropping spider reel, Jackolantern LED lights, toy with scary sound, and the X10 CM17A. Then the arduino sent a serial message to the ioBridge serial API telling to GET the URL of my site. Then on my site I had a bash script with a while loop looking for request coming from the ioBridge server, then the script played a sound, grab the picture from a wireless webcam and post it to twitter via twitpic's API using cURL.

Arduino Sketch

Spider Reel
I end up using an VHS tape as a reel. I had to modify one servo to have continuous rotation. I used this guide to do so. The second servo just did the lift part.

ioBridge Monitor
To establish the arduino-ioBridge serial communication I was planning to use an RF solution, but due to time constraints I had to use a long speaker cable to connect the arduino TX to ioBridge's Serial Board RX with one wire and the second for GND.

#!/bin/bash 
booCounter=$1
while true;do
status=`tail -n 1 /private/var/log/apache2/access_log | cut -f 1 -d "-"`
if [ "$status" = "00.00.000.000 " ]
then
echo "Boo" >> /private/var/log/apache2/access_log
afplay /full/path/Halloween/werewolf.mp3
msg="Boo, victim $booCounter just got really scared"
sleep 5
curl -O http://www.mywebcam.com/IMAGE.JPG
curl -F media=@/full/path/Halloween/IMAGE.JPG -F "username=username" -F "password=password" -F "message=$msg" http://twitpic.com/api/uploadAndPost
let booCounter=booCounter+1
fi
done

• Arduino Duemilanove 

• Adafruit Protoshield

• ioBridge Serial Smart Board

• x10 Transeiver, Appliance and lamp modules

• 2 Futaba S3003 servos
• Nylon rope

• Parallax PIR sensor
• 2 red LEDs

• 2 1K resistors

• 1 2N2222 tranisistor
• 1 10k resistor

• 125VAC/10A DPDT Plug-In Relay (as a switch combined with x10)
• Styrofoam cooler and dryer hose and Ice to create low laying fog.

• Incandescent black light, strobe light, black light bulbs.

Setup
It's all pretty basic. The arduino controlled the PIR motion sensor, the servos for dropping spider reel, Jackolantern LED lights, toy with scary sound, and the X10 CM17A. Then the arduino sent a serial message to the ioBridge serial API telling to GET the URL of my site. Then on my site I had a bash script with a while loop looking for request coming from the ioBridge server, then the script played a sound, grab the picture from a wireless webcam and post it to twitter via twitpic's API using cURL.

Arduino Sketch

Spider Reel
I end up using an VHS tape as a reel. I had to modify one servo to have continuous rotation. I used this guide to do so. The second servo just did the lift part.

ioBridge Monitor
To establish the arduino-ioBridge serial communication I was planning to use an RF solution, but due to time constraints I had to use a long speaker cable to connect the arduino TX to ioBridge's Serial Board RX with one wire and the second for GND.

#!/bin/bash 
booCounter=$1
while true;do
status=`tail -n 1 /private/var/log/apache2/access_log | cut -f 1 -d "-"`
if [ "$status" = "00.00.000.000 " ]
then
echo "Boo" >> /private/var/log/apache2/access_log
afplay /full/path/Halloween/werewolf.mp3
msg="Boo, victim $booCounter just got really scared"
sleep 5
curl -O http://www.mywebcam.com/IMAGE.JPG
curl -F media=@/full/path/Halloween/IMAGE.JPG -F "username=username" -F "password=password" -F "message=$msg" http://twitpic.com/api/uploadAndPost
let booCounter=booCounter+1
fi
done

• Arduino Duemilanove 

• Adafruit Protoshield

• ioBridge Serial Smart Board

• x10 Transeiver, Appliance and lamp modules

• 2 Futaba S3003 servos
• Nylon rope

• Parallax PIR sensor
• 2 red LEDs

• 2 1K resistors

• 1 2N2222 tranisistor
• 1 10k resistor

• 125VAC/10A DPDT Plug-In Relay (as a switch combined with x10)
• Styrofoam cooler and dryer hose and Ice to create low laying fog.

• Incandescent black light, strobe light, black light bulbs.

Setup
It's all pretty basic. The arduino controlled the PIR motion sensor, the servos for dropping spider reel, Jackolantern LED lights, toy with scary sound, and the X10 CM17A. Then the arduino sent a serial message to the ioBridge serial API telling to GET the URL of my site. Then on my site I had a bash script with a while loop looking for request coming from the ioBridge server, then the script played a sound, grab the picture from a wireless webcam and post it to twitter via twitpic's API using cURL.

Arduino Sketch

Spider Reel
I end up using an VHS tape as a reel. I had to modify one servo to have continuous rotation. I used this guide to do so. The second servo just did the lift part.

ioBridge Monitor
To establish the arduino-ioBridge serial communication I was planning to use an RF solution, but due to time constraints I had to use a long speaker cable to connect the arduino TX to ioBridge's Serial Board RX with one wire and the second for GND.

#!/bin/bash 
booCounter=$1
while true;do
status=`tail -n 1 /private/var/log/apache2/access_log | cut -f 1 -d "-"`
if [ "$status" = "00.00.000.000 " ]
then
echo "Boo" >> /private/var/log/apache2/access_log
afplay /full/path/Halloween/werewolf.mp3
msg="Boo, victim $booCounter just got really scared"
sleep 5
curl -O http://www.mywebcam.com/IMAGE.JPG
curl -F media=@/full/path/Halloween/IMAGE.JPG -F "username=username" -F "password=password" -F "message=$msg" http://twitpic.com/api/uploadAndPost
let booCounter=booCounter+1
fi
done