A customer wanted to use industrial photo eye sensors with a piece of lab equipment to measure the speed of a projectile shot out of a air cannon. I assembled a small box with the parts needed to power it and adjust the voltage levels.
I hooked up an old analog camera I had laying around (one of the 15!) to an Axis 2400+ video server I bought off of ebay for $40. A little script that runs every minute and copies a picture from zoneminder to my webhost account. I added the picture as a widget to this website in the sidebar under the weather station doohickey. Once I verify the picture quality in the daylight, I’ll add it the weather cams at wunderground.com.
In a more-complicated-than-need-be step to canceling our satellite TV service, I installed MythTV backend and Plex server on an old computer that was sitting around. I started by installing mythbuntu because I’m already comfortable with using Ubuntu. MythTV uses the inexpensive HDHomeRun tuner as a source for local TV channels from the antenna, and it also has all kinds of capabilities to get content and information from the Internet and your local video libraries. Plex is service that not only finds and matches cover art and artist information to your existing content, but it has the magical ability to transcode your content on the fly when the client needs a different format.
The piece of this project that really made the biggest difference was that Kodi, which can be a front end for MythTV (and much more) can be installed on an Amazon Fire Stick.
I created a new website GalliStead.com where I’ll make all future posts about gardening, permaculture, and aquaponics related projects and updates at our house. I hope to get fencing put in and have a few sheep or goats too. So subscribe to updates on that site if you want to see what’s going on with my gardening efforts.
Here is another fun project I just finished up. My client wanted to be able to know if a vehicle (a train actually) is coming from a mile away. We used a Banner radar sensor in retroreflective mode, a Banner DMX100 controller/radio, and a DX80 multihop radio. The system can be expanded with additional repeaters if more range is needed. I used power tool batteries because they are easy to replace, relatively inexpensive, and high quality. Here is a short video showing a test I did in my neighborhood of the setup (without proper mounting hardware)
Here is a fun project I did for a client that needed a way to safely crash a boat for a test. I used an inexpensive model RC transmitter and receiver, two robotics motor controllers, a linear actuator, a DC gear motor, distance sensor, sprockets and chain, and come custom brackets to make a 23 foot fishing boat remote controlled! Since the boat was going to be crashed, I didn’t spend too much effort making things super nice, but it all worked well enough for their test. Here is a quick video of the components and how they work:
