Wired!

Every once in a while, when I should be working on useful things, I lose focus and launch spontaneous mini-projects. Many have had to do with adding automation and monitoring gimmicks to the Lab, the result being a complex makeshift system that does everything that nobody ever needed a room to do, and a little more.

Monitoring

The first project was the Web Camera, which originated when I mounted a video camera on the wall to record a time-lapse video of the process of repeatedly reorganizing the Lab over the summer of 2006. A few weeks into the run, I sat down and cranked out a couple of shell scripts to automatically process and upload newly captured images from the camera, turning the system into a webcam. The Web Camera has been running almost continuously since then, although in recent weeks the camera's position has changed frequently during reorganization.

Next came temperature monitoring. This was inspired by the discovery that there was an unused connection on the motherboard, which was intended to monitor the temperature of the power supply unit if a suitable sensor was present. My Ebay bargain power supply had no such facility, so instead I connected a spare thermistor via a length of wire running out through one of the many random holes on the front of the case, and expanded the Web Camera scripts to also poll lm_sensors for the current room temperature and upload this data along with the camera image. Later I also added temperature history plots to make things more visually exciting.

The latest addition to the monitoring system is a reed sensor on the door which is monitored by the same computer. Anyone opening the door is greeted by a pleasant but increasingly annoying Bing, "Entry!", and a timestamp is recorded to a log file, which is then uploaded along with the temperature and image data for remote monitoring. In addition, an instant message is sent via AOL Instant Messenger to alert me of the event.
I'm getting increasingly tired of hearing my own voice announcing to me the fact that I am entering the room, so I'm not sure how long the "entry annunciator" feature will last.

Control

Around the same time that I first set up the Web Camera, I also began to automate control of my lights and various other appliances. The first step was to plug all of the lights in my room into X-10 applicance control modules and install a PC interface so that I could use KAlarm to automatically turn on my lights in the morning. Later, I added a number of additional devices, and created a Web interface so that, during the day, random strangers could control my lights, fan, and various electronic novelty devices from their Web browsers. The novelty devices rotate periodically, but have included a helium-neon laser, a plasma globe, a "Disco Party Light", and even (for a necessarily brief time) a fog machine.

Yes, this page is pretty dull at the moment. Hang in there; when I have time (in a month or two, perhaps?) I will come back and make improvements...