Category: Projects

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Projects Thoughts

House analytics

My Dad and I built the alarm system for their house in late 2009. He handled hardware, I did software. From time to time I export the data it collects just for the heck of it, since it’s been running non-stop for years.

The back door at their house has been opened 41,267 since the end of November 2009. That’s kind of surprising to me.

It’s interesting to see some patterns in the graph – it’s how many times the door has been opened per month. You can definitely tell what year I bought my house. 🙂

Back Door Graph

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Projects

Clemson vs Ole Miss – Best Tailgaters

Clemson and Ole Miss are currently battling it out in a poll on Southern Living’s website. Out of curiosity I wrote some code to grab this data and graph it to help visualize who is catching up or pulling ahead. Check it out here!

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Projects

Herp Derp – now with Firefox support

Herp Derp has been updated and now has its very own page. Firefox is now supported and Safari is coming soon…

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Coding Gadgets Projects

Kinect + Arduino

With an Arduino Ethernet, Processing, and a Kinect, I was able to easily create this little demo where hand movement can control a servo. This is just a tiny step in my master plan to create a robot clone so that I don’t have to leave my chair.

The following libraries and drivers made this work and also made it super easy for me to create it:

OpenKinect
Daniel Shiffman’s Processing Kinect Library (he knows his stuff and has great examples on his site)
Arduino Ethernet UDP send / receive string

Servo:
EMAX ES08A Servo

How it works:

  1. The Arduino Ethernet acquires an IP address and waits for UDP packets on a certain port.
  2. The machine with the Kinect sends packets to the Arduino that contain hand coordinate data.
  3. The Arduino then takes this data (an integer) and maps the range from 0 to 180 degrees.
  4. The mapped value is sent to the servo.
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Arduino Projects Video

Arduino’d Gingerbread House

It’s not a serious competition until you’ve put a microcontroller inside your gingerbread house. Since we were going for the Charlie Brown theme, I ripped apart and adapted a musical card that played ‘Linus and Lucy’. I also rigged up some LEDs to blink with the music. Video below the pictures.