If it wasn’t for the weird Dutch-Norwegian techno you’d presumably have to listen to forever, [Gianni B.]’s doll house for his daughter, [Rita] makes living in a Barbie World seem like a worthwhile endeavor. True to modern form, it’s got LED lighting. It’s got IoT. It’s got an app and an elevator. It even has a tiny, working, miniature television.

It all started with a Christmas wish. [Rita] could no longer stand to bear the thought of her Barbie dolls living a homeless lifestyle on her floor, begging passing toys for enough monopoly money to buy a sock to sleep under. However, when [Gianni] visited the usual suspects to purchase a dollhouse he found them disappointing and expensive.

So, going with the traditional collaborating-with-Santa ruse, he and his family had the pleasure of collaborating on a dollhouse development project. Each room is lit by four ultra bright LEDs. There is an elevator that’s controlled by an H-bridge module, modified to have electronic braking. [Rita] doesn’t own a Dr. Barbie yet, so safety is paramount.

The brain of the home automation is a PIC micro with a Bluetooth module. He wrote some code for it, available here. He also went an extra step and used MIT’s scratch to make an app interface for the dollhouse. You can see it work in the video after the break. The last little hack was the TV. An old arduino, an SD Card shield, and a tiny 2.4 inch TFT combine to make what’s essentially a tiny digital picture frame.

His daughter’s are overjoyed with the elevation of their doll’s economic class and a proud father even got to show it off at a Maker Faire. Very nice!

[Ken Rumer] bought a new house. It came with a troublingly complex pool system. It had solar heating. It had gas heating. Electricity was involved somehow. It had timers and gadgets. Sand could be fed into one end and clean water came out the other. There was even a spa thrown into the mix.

Needless to say, within the first few months of owning their very own chemical plant they ran into some near meltdowns. They managed to heat the pool with 250 dollars of gas in a day. They managed to drain the spa entirely into the pool, but thankfully never managed the reverse. [Ken] knew something had to change. It didn’t hurt that it seemed like a fun challenge.

The first step was to tear out as much of the old control system as could be spared. An old synchronous motor timer’s chlorine rusted guts were ripped out. The solar controler was next to be sent to its final resting place. The manual valves were all replaced with fancy new ones.

Rather than risk his fallible human state draining the pool into the downstairs toilet, he’d add a robot’s cold logical gatekeeping in order to protect house and home. It was a simple matter of involving the usual suspects. Raspberry Pi and Arduino Man collaborated on the controls. Import relay boards danced to their commands. A small suite of sensors lent their aid.

Now as the soon-to-be autumn sun sets, the pool begins to cool and the spa begins to heat automatically. The children are put to bed, tired from a fun day at the pool, and [Ken] gets to lounge in his spa; watching the distant twinkling of lights on his backyard industrial complex.

Anyone who owns their own pool knows it’s not as simple as filling it up with water and jumping in whenever you want. There’s pool covers to deal with, regular cleaning with the pool vacuum and skimmers, and of course, all of the chemicals that have to be added to keep the water safe. While there are automatic vacuums, there aren’t a whole lot of options for automating the pool chemicals. [Clément] decided to tackle this problem, eliminating one more task from the maintenance of his home. (Google Translate from French.)

The problem isn’t as simple as adding a set amount of chemicals at a predetermined time. The amount of chemicals that a pool owner has to add are dependent on the properties of the water, and the amount of time that’s elapsed since the previous chemical treatment, and the number of people who have been using the water, and whether or not the pool cover is in use. To manage all of this, [Clément] used an ORP/Redox probe and a pH probe, and installed both in the filtration system. The two probes are wired to an Arduino with an ethernet shield. The Arduino controls electrically actuated chemical delivery systems that apply the required amount of chemicals to the pool, keeping it at a nice, healthy balance.

[Clément] has all of the Arduino code available on his project page, as well as information about all of the various sensors he used. This should make this project re-createable for anyone who is tired of dealing with their own pool or paying a pool maintenance company to do it for them. [Clément] is no stranger to home automation projects, either, and we look forward to his next (often unconventional) project to automate something we might not have thought of before.

Take three NRF24L0+ radios, two Arduino Nanos, and a Raspberry Pi. Add a bored student and a dorm room at Rice University. What you get is the RRAD: Rice Ridiculously Automated Dorm. [Jordan Poles] built a modular system inspired by BRAD (the Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Dorm).

RRAD has three types of nodes:

• Actuation nodes – Allows external actuators like relays or solenoids
• Sensory nodes – Reports data from sensors (light, temperature, motion)
• Hub nodes – Hosts control panel, records data, provides external data interfaces

The hub also allows [Jordan] to control things with his Android phone with Tasker. He has the Arduino and Raspberry Pi code on GitHub if you want to ridiculously automate something of your own. You’d probably want to adapt it to your dorm room, house, or RV, though.

[Jordan] continues to work on the project and promises to have voice recognition and other features, soon. We cover a lot of home automation projects including some others described as ridiculous. The video below shows BRAD, the inspiration for RRAD.

Many times you would have wished that you could take care of your dog remotely instead of letting a careless friend handle him. The answer to the problem is this ingenious twitter based feeding device by Nat Morris.

Theres a Nanode microcontroller (an Arduino clone with ENC28J60 ethernet), LCD screen from an old Dell laser printer, the stepper motor mechanism is out of a HP Deskjet 500 from the 90′s. The stepper is controlled via a ULN2003 and a 555 timer is used for the buzzer. Theres a pair of IP cameras (ones broke at the moment) and a server process which polls twitter and co-ordinates it all.

So how many more applications can you think of using the same concept?

[Via: webpronews]