I've completed the first of my 25 planned handheld buzzers for my trivia buzzer system. I've embedded a short video showing that it actually works below:
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Tuesday, January 01, 2013
Thievery Caught by Geekery
So I live in a less-than-stellar part of town. When me and my roommates talked to people about the area, they said they felt relatively safe, but if you have an aftermarket stereo, don't park on the street because someone will definitely smash in your window to get it. I have a factory stereo and never leave anything in my car, so I wasn't too worried (my apartment back in undergrad wasn't much better).
Things were fine for the first year we lived here, no incidents at all. But several months ago, at the end of July, something was stolen from our front porch. My roommate ordered a used iPhone online, and it arrived in a plain cardboard box, nothing on the box or label to hint that it was anything valuable. His wife came home to see that the box was not on our porch, but instead was sitting by the sidewalk, EMPTY! It appeared that someone had walked right up to our porch, ninja'd said package, stolen the iPhone, and tossed the empty box on the ground. The craziest part is that this happened in the middle of the day!
But unbeknownst to this thief is that they messed with what is arguably the most wired house in the neighborhood. For shits and giggles, I set up a $60 wireless IP camera to watch our porch when we first moved in. It's mounted on the inside of the house, looking at the front porch through the small window above the front door. I set up my media server to perform motion capture using Zoneminder, which would save a picture whenever it detected movement in the image. My friends gave me crap every time they would come visit, asking "why the hell do you have a camera sitting above your door?" Well, it turns out that being a nerd comes in very handy in situations like this.
Things were fine for the first year we lived here, no incidents at all. But several months ago, at the end of July, something was stolen from our front porch. My roommate ordered a used iPhone online, and it arrived in a plain cardboard box, nothing on the box or label to hint that it was anything valuable. His wife came home to see that the box was not on our porch, but instead was sitting by the sidewalk, EMPTY! It appeared that someone had walked right up to our porch, ninja'd said package, stolen the iPhone, and tossed the empty box on the ground. The craziest part is that this happened in the middle of the day!
But unbeknownst to this thief is that they messed with what is arguably the most wired house in the neighborhood. For shits and giggles, I set up a $60 wireless IP camera to watch our porch when we first moved in. It's mounted on the inside of the house, looking at the front porch through the small window above the front door. I set up my media server to perform motion capture using Zoneminder, which would save a picture whenever it detected movement in the image. My friends gave me crap every time they would come visit, asking "why the hell do you have a camera sitting above your door?" Well, it turns out that being a nerd comes in very handy in situations like this.
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| The camera caught our thief: a young girl probably no more than 8 years old. As the timestamp shows, this happened on July 31st, 2012 at 4:36 PM -- right in the middle of broad daylight! |
Arduino: Trivia/Game Show Buzzer System
So I have a new addiction: Arduino.
The Arduino is a programmable microcontroller. It's a way to create your own electronics projects at home. Ever wish you could have you garage door automatically close if you leave it open? With the Arduino, you can (and I did). I set up a small sensor that will relay to the Arduino when the garage door is opened. If it is left open for more than 5 minutes, it will close the garage door via a relay switch connected to the garage door opener. Others have done similar projects in which they even hooked theirs up to their web server so they could close the door via their smartphone. I didn't have much use for that feature, so I'm perfectly satisfied with my setup. I've also read about other people making Pumpkin Tetris, security systems, windows that close themselves when a train is coming, and all kinds of cool stuff. It's for the hobbyist nerd, definitely, but that doesn't make it any less cool.
For my current project, I'm making a trivia buzzer system, like in Jeopardy. My girlfriend's family plays a few games of trivia like this every Christmas. It's a lot of fun (I'll admit, I was very skeptical at first), but it's very low-tech in that everyone just raises their hand and her uncle is the judge of who raised their hand first. It's all for fun, and [usually] no one gets too upset if they think their hand was actually up first. But because I'm a nerd, I thought about how much cooler it would be if I could set up a system with handheld buzzers that would take some of the heat off her uncle. At this point, I'm not planning on including scorekeeping, so he won't be entirely without a job.
Here's a short video of the prototype I built:
The Arduino is a programmable microcontroller. It's a way to create your own electronics projects at home. Ever wish you could have you garage door automatically close if you leave it open? With the Arduino, you can (and I did). I set up a small sensor that will relay to the Arduino when the garage door is opened. If it is left open for more than 5 minutes, it will close the garage door via a relay switch connected to the garage door opener. Others have done similar projects in which they even hooked theirs up to their web server so they could close the door via their smartphone. I didn't have much use for that feature, so I'm perfectly satisfied with my setup. I've also read about other people making Pumpkin Tetris, security systems, windows that close themselves when a train is coming, and all kinds of cool stuff. It's for the hobbyist nerd, definitely, but that doesn't make it any less cool.
For my current project, I'm making a trivia buzzer system, like in Jeopardy. My girlfriend's family plays a few games of trivia like this every Christmas. It's a lot of fun (I'll admit, I was very skeptical at first), but it's very low-tech in that everyone just raises their hand and her uncle is the judge of who raised their hand first. It's all for fun, and [usually] no one gets too upset if they think their hand was actually up first. But because I'm a nerd, I thought about how much cooler it would be if I could set up a system with handheld buzzers that would take some of the heat off her uncle. At this point, I'm not planning on including scorekeeping, so he won't be entirely without a job.
Here's a short video of the prototype I built:
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