Posts – Page 4 – ~scriven

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

Weasley Clock

So, in case you haven’t read the Harry Potter series or seen the movies, the Weasley Clock is a magical clock that tracks the location of the various family members. This has been duplicated with technology in various ways already, and I thought it would be cool to try one myself.
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DIY/Homemade Water Guns – Collected Thoughts

The heat of this summer (2015, Vancouver, BC Area), along with something that happened to my youngest child, prompted me to look into how to DIY a good water gun.

My youngest was at an end-of-the-school year party at a local park. The kids were told it was OK to bring water guns, yay! So we went out and bought a couple of cheap water guns. Long story short, my kid had fun, but was severely outgunned…

So I thought maybe I’d see if the internet had a solution to that. 😉
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