“We have an emergency alert in detention block AA-23.” – Random Death Star Administration Team Member. When I first moved into my house I found there was a Networx NX-4 alarm installed. Great! All I needed to do after that was add a network connection to it so that I could control it from my […]
“It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.” – C-3PO. This post is part of a 3 part series, starting with part 1. Now that I had determined the protocol used to communicate with the air conditioner, the remaining activity was to create a new web service to impersonate the ninja blocks one being used by […]
“Security isn’t a dirty word, Blackadder!” – General Melchett. This post is part of a 3 part series, starting with part 1 and finishing with part 3. After finding that the new wireless air conditioner control module I bought couldn’t be directly controlled, I needed to reverse engineer how the system worked to determine if it was […]
“What a piece of junk!” – Luke Skywalker. A case could be made that I’ve chosen that specific quote because I just really like Star Wars. On an unrelated topic to that quote, I recently purchased a piece of equipment that supplements the air conditioner in my house allowing me to control the air conditioner […]
“Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” – Master Yoda. Super cool. As I was reaching down behind the couch recently to find the light switch for the lamp, I was thinking about opportunities to further automate my house with gadgets. Sadly, later as I strained for the second time to reach the switch to turn the […]
“Either shut him up or shut him down!” – Han Solo. We moved house recently and I was obviously very keen to continue the home automation routine. As described in Adventures with an Arduino – Part 1: The Business Problem, I created an Arduino based garage door interface to integrate with a BOSS BOL6 garage door […]
“M-my lord, it-it’s impossible to locate the ship. It’s out of our range.” – Nute Gunray We recently moved into a new house and as always the first problem to address was finding the optimal place to park cars in the garage. Ideally, we wanted to park the cars as close to the garage door […]
“I ain’t been dropping no eaves, sir, honest!” – Sam Gamgee. I have an upcoming problem that I need to solve with regards to my car (which is an Australian Holden 2009 VE Commodore). My car doesn’t have a USB iPhone interface, only a Stereo Auxiliary port. Whilst this works relatively well, I can’t control […]
“Our situation has not improved.” – Henry Jones. I ran into a strange problem recently with an Arduino project that I was working on. The existing code had been working perfectly up to that point, but I needed to add some more code for additional functionality. As soon as I did that however, I started […]
“But how could they be jamming us if they don’t know… that we’re coming?” – Lando Calrissian. That’s probably the only Star Wars quote that came to mind in regards to wireless/radio communications. As part of one of the Arduino projects I had created, which was an ultrasonic range finder to ensure the cars were parked […]
Hopefully Helpful Hints // Mike J McGuire 