Sure… anyone can go to the local store and buy a coffee maker with a timer. That was not good enough for our new member Ryan Merl.  Keeping in the hacking spirit, Ryan decided to make his own internet controlled coffee maker. He installed a relay between the wall cord and the power switch on the coffee pot. The relay is controlled by his arduino. He used this tutorial as a guide.  An ethernet shield is used to connect the arduino to the network.

You can find the source code for this project here: https://github.com/theanti9/HTTPCoffeePot. Be sure to checkout the Readme.doc for more details.

Special Features

• 15 minute automatic shutoff
• Controlled via HTTP Requests
• Status, start, and stop requests
• Returns JSON meant for AJAX interfaces
• Ready and running LEDs

HTTPCoffeePot can be connected to your arduino with an ethernet shield and attached to the network. It will listen on port 80, like a normal web server, and take several different request URLs to control it. The URLs return JSON with the intention that an AJAX interface will be built over it:

• /status/ – This will return some information about the current status of the coffee pot
• /start/ – This will start the coffee pot assuming that it is currently ready to be started and not started already
• /stop/ – This will turn off the coffee pot

Currently the process will work like this:

1. Put in coffee grounds/filter/water
2. Press ready button to enter coffee pot into ready state
3. When coffee is desired, send /start/ request
4. Wait for coffee to finish
5. Send manual /stop/ request OR wait for timed automatic shut off to take place after 15 minutes

I have a very simple coffee maker which is really only a switch. The modifications I made to the pot were to cut the power inside of it between the wall and the switch on the pot and place a relay in between. The relay is then activated by the Arduino board when sent the /start/ request.

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Last week I was having a discussion with one of our members about solutions on how we can control his biped robot he is working on.  I was trying to explain that we could go something like zigbee (which he has a zigbee servo controller already) but you’re going to trade off throughput, if you wanted to add streaming video to it, and we’ll need to construct something for the pc to talk to the zigbee network.  We could go bluetooth, or even wifi, etc.  And it became a discussion of push pull’s difficulty implementing it, writing code for, cost of parts, etc.

(Biped robot pictured below if you havent’ seen it, it’s really awesome!)

Anyway, I stumbled on this article on digikey’s web site that goes into further detail, but I wanted to share this nice little chart they have in the article.  It really sums up cost vs range vs throughput vs robustness.  I found it useful, thought someone else might also.  Enjoy.

You’re not ? Well check us out here. Furthermore we’re doing some google+ stuff too.

Oh and here’s some of the stuff you’ve been missing!

GPS speedo, keepon, old parts, more old parts, dip pic32, and first glimpse at the cake o tron!

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What are we going to do with our newly acquired vintage 1977 Lear Siegler terminal?  Why, we’ll play ASCII Star Wars Episode IV on it, of course!  Recently purchased at the 2011 Techno Swap Fest, this baby-blue beauty has classic 70′s styling, comfortable keyboard and gets 80 columns on the screen in a lovely white uppercase font.  It took some coaxing to get Baby Blue to play along with an Ubuntu-equipped laptop including tweaking some DIP switches hidden inside her chassis, some clever character substitutions in the ASCII Star Wars file, reading the datasheet for the terminal itself (thanks, Wikipedia!), and wiring up both a FTDI USB-to-serial converter and a MAX232 level converter IC.  But the results were worth a quick video.  Future improvements could include a way to hide the cursor (hardware modification?) and possibly speeding up draws by only painting the characters that have changed.  What do ya think?

When Jeremy ‘Awesome’ Ashinghurst is not busy hacking at HaHa, researching new and interesting ways to make power tools dangerous or just generally being awesome, he’s busy riding his custom-built gravity-powered vehicle, also known as a soapbox kart, at dangerously high speeds down steep hills.  Well, all of the hard work and road rash paid off for Jeremy recently when he won the grand prize in Make Magazine’s Karts and Wheels contest. Keep your eyes peeled for Make Volume 26, starring Mr. Awesome’s Kart, at your local newsstand.  In the meantime, read his entire, well-documented build on the Make Blog.  Go Awesome, go!

Like most normal people, I enjoy blinky lights.  Although I helped build the ring of lights in the Tron disc, I was not involved with any of the hardware or software used to actually control the LEDs.  Prior to this project, I had never done anything more than simple PWM control of a few LEDs directly from a micro-controller, so I decided it was a good time to learn how to control a lot of LEDs.  Since this was done for the purpose of learning, I did everything as difficultly as possible, such as building my own LED array on a protoboard instead of just buying an array.  I also wrote code to bit-bang the serial data instead of just using the compiler’s built in SPI function.  But, I wanted a generic serial data module anyway after dealing with the Nokia 6100 and it’s weird 9-bit SPI.  The main point of the whole project was to simply do it myself without asking anyone at the space for help with anything.  I’m sure the code could be a lot better, but it does what it is supposed to do (I think).  :)

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Betascape was this previous weekend and Harford Hackerspace was on hand with robots, lightning bug jars, and general awesomeness. We setup early Saturday morning between Baltimore Node and the First Lego League representatives. The day was spent forging various cardboard blades with crayons and stickers with various children blacksmiths quietly honing their craft. All in all we gave away approximately 50 swords to young lads and lasses who,  no doubt, brought these mighty cardboard weapons to bear against a variety of fiends.

The previously mentioned Baltimore Node was there demonstrating various projects such as air powered rockets and some sort of power tool drag racing. Set up across from us was The Digital Media Center from Johns Hopkins  demonstrating cloth circuitry and teaching others about cloth circuits. The National Electronics Museum was setup in the back with some kind of robot (which I did not see). Various other people included a company demonstrating a 3D picture taking technology, Bryan Dolge with a makerbot, as well of a bunch of gamemakers in the game making section.

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We are currently in the process of revising our CNC design since the Y/Z axis was eating its rails over time due to slight alignment issues.  We decided to upgrade the bearings in general to avoid the problem in the future.  The x-axis seems to be working fine, so we are going to leave it alone for now.   The revision includes CNC cut pieces instead of hand cut pieces (using table saws and drill presses).   We also did a major upgrade to the bearings and went with ACME-type lead screws to minimize backlash and improve accuracy.  We updated the stepper couplings to the lead screws to make future maintenance easier.  The redesign is expected to be complete within the month.

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Me and my wife recently had our first child.  I’ve been trying to come up with some projects I can do for the kid.  Well, around this time of the year the fireflies go crazy around my house, so we came up with the idea to do led fireflies in a jar.  It should be something cool for him to stare at and is easy to build.

Schematics, C source code and hex file are available here on our wiki.  If you want to build one it should only take about an hour.

I’m planning on making a version 2 with some changes, stay tuned for that one.

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Look what the postman brought us today!  Not sure what we’re going to do with it yet, but it could have a cameo in an upcoming project…  If you’re not familiar with Sugru, check it out here.