Planet Arduino

Mate Marschalko, who gave us the recent RC car over wireless and a racing wheel project now has a cool Ikea hack to share. He took an Ikea lamp and used a WiFi-enabled Arduino compatible microcontroller to create an alert notification light for his desk. He writes: This IKEA lamp […]

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The post Get Media Alerts from Your Lamp with This Ikea Hack appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

Meet project Oro, the temperature monitoring watchdog. Err… the watchdog monitoring temperature probe. Well, it’s both actually!

[Richard Deininger] built the project after having the AC system go down in his company’s server room. That environmental cooling is imperative if you don’t want your server hardware turned to slag. The idea is a separate piece of hardware that monitors the room temperature and will alert the on-call staff if it climbs too high. He was successful, and showing the hacked hardware around the office came up with a second idea: a temperature sensor for your car to ensure it’s not too hot for your dog.

Anyone who has a canine friend living with them knows you don’t utter the word “ride” out loud lest a barking, whimpering, whining frenzy ensue. But jingle those keys and they’ll be at the door in no time. During the summer you can still take them with you for short errands thanks to the peace of mind [Richard’s] build provides. It’s simply an Arduino, DHT22 temp/humidity probe, and a SIM900 GSM modem. Set your temperature threshold and you’ll get an alert if temperatures are climbing to unsafe levels for Fido.

While you have your tools out, we recommend building auto-watering and auto-feeding systems for the family pets. What’s that? You hate domesticated animals? There’s a hack you can use to chase them from your yard.

[Bayres’] dad setup a webcam as a surveillance camera for a remote property. The only problem was that the only stable Internet connection they could get at this property was DSL. This meant that the external IP address of the webcam would change somewhat often; the needed a way to keep track of the external IP address whenever it changed. That’s when [Bayres] built a solution using Arduino and an Ethernet shield.

The main function of this device is to monitor the public IP address and report any changes. This is accomplished by first making a request to checkip.dyndns.org. This website simply reports your current public IP address. [Bayres] uses an Arduino library called Textfinder in order to search through the returned string and identify the IP address.

From there, the program compares this current value to the previous one. If there is any change, the program uses the Sendmail() function to reach out to an SMTP server and send an e-mail alert to [Beyres’] dad. The system also includes a small LCD. The Arduino outputs the current IP address to this display, making it easy to check up on the connection. The LCD is driven by 74HC595 shift register in order to conserve pins on the Arduino.

The system is also designed with a pretty slick setup interface. When it is booted, the user can enter a configuration menu via a Serial terminal. This setup menu allows the user to configure options such as SMTP server, email address, etc. These variables are then edited and can be committed to EEPROM as a more permanent storage solution. Whenever the system is booted, these values are read back out of the EEPROM and returned to their appropriate variables. This means you can reconfigure the device on the fly without having to edit the source code and re-upload.