The last few years have seen an incredible increase in the marketing for home automation devices. Why this tech is just picking up now is something we’ll never understand – home automation systems have been around for decades, mostly in the form of security systems. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [IngGaro] is building an Arduino-based security system that does everything you would expect from a home automation system, from closing the shutters to temperature monitoring.

[IngGaro]’s system is built around a shield for an Arduino Mega. This shield includes connections to an alarm system, a GSM modem, temperature and humidity sensors, an Ethernet module, and IR movement sensors. This Arduino Mega attaches to a control box mounted near the front door that’s loaded up with an LCD, an NFC and RFID reader, and a few buttons to arm and disarm the system.

This project has come a long way since it was featured in last year’s Hackaday Prize. Since then [IngGaro] finally completed the project thanks to a change in the Ethernet library. It’s much more stable now, and has the ability to completely control everything in a house that should be automated. Now all [IngGaro] needs to do is create a cool PCB for the project, but in our opinion you can’t do much better than the mastery of perfboard this project already has.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Use an Apple Watch to automagically open doors at home or at work with a tap on your wrist.

Read more on MAKE

The post Make an Apple Watch Door Unlocker appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

Now that summer is coming, it’s time to break out the Air Conditioners! There are some old AC units out there that still work just fine, but nowadays we are used to everything being remotely controlled and automatic. [Phil] had an old window-mounted AC unit that still worked but was installed in a not-so-convenient place. To access the AC’s controls, one would have to climb over a large desk. This is a perfect opportunity to use the plethora of widely available hobby electronics to make an automatic AC controller retrofit.

First things first, there needs to be a way to turn the current control knob on the AC. [Phil] modeled up a 3D bracket to hold an RC car servo to the AC control panel. Attached to the servo horn is a slotted cylinder sized appropriately to fit the shape of the control knob. An Arduino measures the temperature of the room via a DS18B20 temperature sensor which then has the servo turn the control knob to the appropriate position, on or off. The Arduino sends temperature data back to a PC via MegunoLink Pro which graphs past data and also displays current temperature data. Using MegunoLink Pro, the min/max temperature points can also be set without uploading a new sketch to the Arduino.

From the temp vs time graph, it looks like the room temperature stays a consistent 23 +/- 1 °C. [Phil] did us summer-swelterers a favor and made all his design files available. This is a great idea but wonder if leaving the air conditioner unit switch in the ‘on’ position and turning the unit on/off via a relay connected to the 120vac line would work just as well.

Read more on MAKE

We’re no strangers to home automation projects around here, but it’s not often that you see one described in this much detail. [Paul] designed a custom home automation system with four teammates for an undergraduate thesis project.

The system is broken into two main components; the server and the peripherals. The team designed their peripherals from early prototypes of an upcoming ArduIMU v4 measurement unit. They removed all of the default sensors to keep costs down and reduce assembly time. The units can them be hooked up to various peripherals such as temperature sensors, mains relays, RGB color strips, etc.

The central management of the system is performed using a web-based user interface. The web server runs on Java, and interacts with the peripherals wirelessly. Basic messages can be sent back and forth to either read the state of the peripherals or to change the state. As far as the user is concerned, these messages appear as simple triggers and actions. This makes it very simple to program the peripherals using if, then, else logic.

The main project page is a very brief summary of what appears to be a very well documented project. The team has made available their 182 page final report (pdf), which goes into the nitty-gritty details of the project. Also, be sure to watch the demonstration video below.

Let’s be honest. Paying electricity bills sucks. The amount paid is always too much, and the temperatures in the building are rarely set at a comfortable level. But now, with the help of this DIY Climate Control system, power-users can finally rejoice knowing that the heating and cooling process of their home (or commercial space) can be easily controlled through the utilization of an XBee Remote Kit and a process called zoning.

The team behind the project is [Doug], [Benjamin] and [Lucas]. They hope to solve the inconsistent temperature problems, which are caused by a moving sun, by open-sourcing their work into the community.

Their XBee system runs on a mesh network making it a perfect tool for sensing and communicating which areas in the house are too hot or too cold. Once the data is collected, XBee modules route the information wirelessly to each other until it reaches a central Arduino gatekeeper; which then decides if it wants to heat, ventilate, or air condition the room.

Not to mention all the added benefits posted below:

For one, you can hook-up temperature ICs like the TMP36 (PDF) without the need to buy extra parts. Better yet, the XBee can be programmed to fall asleep thus saving battery life. This means that the whole module can run on rechargeable AAA batteries.

Even further, it can be coded at its various ports to read other devices. This is great because it gives the setup the potential to turn on and off devices that are hooked to the module, transforming it into a networked hub of interconnected devices.

This approach not only allows you to be involved in saving the planet, but it keeps your home, warehouse, or office building at a much more comfortable level in the process, a real win-win.

The project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.

In the near future, we will all reside in households that contain hundreds of little devices intertwingled together with an easily connectable and controllable network of sensors. For years, projects have been appearing all around the world, like this wireless sensor system that anyone can build.

[Eric] hopes his work will help bring the truly expansive Home-Area-Network (HAN) into fruition by letting developers build cheap, battery-powered, long-range wireless sensors. His method integrates with the pluggable OSGI architecture and home automation platform openHAB along with using an Arduino as the lower power, sensor node that is capable of utilizing many types of cheap sensors found online.

[Eric]’s tutorial depicts a few examples of the possibilities of these open-source platforms. For instance, he shows what he calls a ‘Mailbox Sentinel’ which is a battery-powered mail monitoring device that uses a Raspberry Pi to play the infamous, and ancient AOL sound bite “you’ve got mail.” It will also send an email once the postman cometh.

In addition, he lists other ideas such as a baby monitoring sentinel, a washer/dryer notification system, water leak detectors, and security implementations that blast a loud alarm if someone tries to break in. All of this potential for just around $20.

The key to making this project work, as [Eric] states, is the MQTT binding that ties together the Ardiuno and openHAB platform. This allows for simple messages to be sent over the Ethernet connection which is often found in IoT devices.

So all you developers out there go home and start thinking of what could be connected next! Because with this system, all you need is a couple of ten-spots and an internet plug, and you have yourself a strong foundation to build on top of. The rest is up to you.

This open, connected device is [Eric's] entry for The Hackaday Prize. You can see his video demo after the break. We hope this inspires you to submit your own project to the contest!

We’re happy to share with you the update of the Indiegogo campaign of the Arduino At Heart for home automation we presented some time ago. Ez Control goes wireless!

———————————–

We have been silent for most of the time of this campaign, but this doesn’t means that we were sleeping. Not at all!

We were listening and interacting. We have received your comments, we have followed the topic on Reddit, we have exchanged ideas with many of you and we spent all this time improving our product.

Some of you was concerned about the relay, maybe too small. Some other concern was related to the position of the temperature sensor, that could offer false reading caused by the heat from other components.

We have upgraded the relay with a new one, rated 5A, and we have also improved the physical insulation for the high voltage circuit. We have then improved the insulation of the temperature sensor.

Sure all interesting, but those where not the main doubts about our hardware.

The most requested upgrade was related to the connectivity.

Why in 2014 do we use wires?

We admit that going wireless it was in our plans for the future. We wanted to start with an easy to use board, affordable and based on well known technologies, open to most of the users.

Reading and listening all your comments, we have understood that we should change our plan, and we did it.

Yes! We spent the past month with design, engineering, prototyping and testing of the brand new and immediately available EZboard WiFi!

This means that every perk and everyone will receive NOT the old board based on the cables and 10Mbit Ethernet controller, but this new, fantastic, WiFi development board.

And the price will not change!!!

Andrea & the EZBoard team

————–

Read all the info on Indiegogo and support them now!

Marco Schwarz is an electrical engineer and passionate about home automation. He wrote us some weeks ago to present his work on the Arduino Yún:

I was recently playing with the Arduino Yún for a whole set of new projects, and I discovered a sketch that implements a REST API for the Arduino Yún. We’ll see in more details what a REST API is, but for now let’s say it allows to standardise the communication between your Arduino and the external world via WiFi or Ethernet, and develop complex applications without having to modify your Arduino sketch every time.

So I told myself: why not create one REST API for the CC3000 WiFi chip ? That’s exactly what I did as a weekend project, and I wanted to share it with you. If you want to directly jump to the project files, go over to the GitHub repository of the project.

Keep reading on his blog or watch the video below: