Wednesday, September 24, 2008

First ring!!


Finally someone rang the bell, besides me that is! Since I enabled the logging no one rang the bell, until today!

Yesterday I improved the web list of events to enable to remove the ones I have seen, so now each door bell ring appears as a link which, upon clicking is removed from the list. It does stay in the database (MySQL) and I will do a page to display the old ones.

The next step is the web cam taking pictures. I hacked a cheap web cam which couldn't handle the street - to bright - and the darkness, and turned it into a IR web cam, which works great at night with IR led illumination provided by a remote control. It still doesn't handle the street light that well, so I think I'll have 2 cameras: one visible for the day pictures, and an IR one for the nights...or I might try to find a decent web cam that can handle it all, and works with linux out of the box.


Update: Just finished getting the house to Twit, and report to twitter whenever anybody rings the bell! check it here! well, in fact it is not really real time, every hour it checks if anyone did and puts it to twitter, this because I switch the modems off whenever they are not in use. The script turn on the modems, reports to twitter and the modems get turned off again automatically after a few minutes.
As an extra it also reports to twitter if the electricity consumption was over 1Kwh in the last hour!

Monday, September 15, 2008

Computerized Door Bell

Link
Finally I managed to get the door bell to be connected to the computer!! and make a schematic from it! I used a arduino shield that a friend lent me to check the functioning and then made a small board using those prototyping boards! I'll upload a photo later on! I drew the schematic using http://draw.labs.autodesk.com/ADDraw/draw.html

It was difficult to find a nice tool to make a schematic using free software...
Now, each time someone rings my bell, an entry gets added to a database. Nothing else happens yet, but the plan is to get a ring tone (stereo!!), but I found out that the audio out of the server is not enough to make noise via a small un-amplified speaker, so I am now investigating the possibilities!

I hope the transistor is the correct one - the library at the site doesn't have that many!