Posts – Page 4 – ~scriven

Introducing the RePhone!

A while ago, while my wife and I were doing that Modern Canadian Task we all love: What to do now that the cellphone contract is over?

I’ve been unhappy with the current cellphone/smrtphone/handheld computer options for a while, and have looked into building my own in various and sundry ways, but never got one done. With the end of the contract and the ability to do WTF we wanted with our old Blackberry’s and the contract, I thought I’d look again at the offerings available online. And that’s when I came across the RePhone Kickstarter.

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Entertainment Center

Finally got around to mounting the monitor on the VESA-mount arm I’ve had kicking around for ages.
Moved the Raspberry Pi to behind the wooden support, wired everything up and hid most of the wires behind the support.

The Pi is currently running OMSC, but basically only for the weather plugin right now. I have used it for watching videos, but the internal setup isn’t fixed yet and the games we play on the Homebrew-modded Wii.

Planned/Wanted updates include:

I would like to add a USB MPEG Encoder, HD/LD capable to encode things like VCR movies, stream Wii video games, but also accommodate upgrades and adding HD to the mix.
I want to create some power-adapter bits-and-pieces, so I can use a regular computer power supply to power the various USB/5V and 12V devices with a single device. Molex-USB female adapters anyone?
I need a shorter HDMI-DVI24+1 cable.

Door Computer

Another use I had for a Small Board Computer was as a door security system. The Raspberry Pi with attached Adafruit touchscreen and camera would be perfect for this. Also add a magnetic sensor for “door open”, and a more general motion or even position sensor.

I actually got most of the way through the basics of this project. One of the problems I ran into was getting a clean picture to the rpi’s camera through the door’s existing peephole. It would probably be best to figure out a solution better suited to the camera, and just swap out eye-pieces when the door camera is installed (remembering to keep the original one for replacement if you ever need to).
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Balcony Computer

I’ve been thinking of how useful a little computer on the balcony would be. Not for any kind of interactive use, but for data collection and light controls and other such things. I thought I’d make up a list of these “such things”, to see what it would take to make it a reality.

The original seed for the idea was a weather station, just to see how cold and windy-ish it was, as well as barometric pressure readings. Since it’s on a covered balcony, the wind readings will be interesting but probably quite local. I’m also not going to worry about precipitation measuring, nor wind-direction measuring at first. It shouldn’t get much rain, nor will the direction of the wind be generally useful most of the time I don’t think. I’m certainly prepared to be wrong on that, but that’s what the prior versions will be for.
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DIY Water Gun- V1

As promised in my DIY/Homemade Water Guns post, here are some pictures of the various stages of our build process following this Instructable: Easy-Peasy PVC Water Gun [All Steps].

We started with a collection of parts, and the kids and I cut the 10′ pvc pipes into 6 pieces. Each gun used:

PVC: 1 1/4″, 20″ pipe
PVC: 1 1/4″ End Cap
PVC: 1″, 20″ pipe
PVC: 1″ T
PVC: 3/4″ (IIRC) Threaded Cap
Rubber O-rings x2
Teflon Thread Tape
PVC primer and glue

I have variously lived and worked on the stolen & unceded territories of the:

I also think it's very important to recognize out loud the ongoing genocides of:
Gaza, Sudan, Turtle Island (North America), Tibet