RasPi Softener Salt Level Monitor

If you can't tell from the fact that this is my first post in 2014 and it's March already that I am not one for routine tasks, then I'll tell you.  I'm not one for routine tasks.  More often then not, I get distracted or forget.  So when it comes to my water softener, I usually discover it's low after the black plastic spatulas all turn white.  So it's about time I did something about it.

I was inspire by the cool (and cheap) HC-SR04 distance sensors. They look like cool little robot heads and can tell you how far away something is.  I HAD to use one for something.

Johnny Five

The idea was simple.  Monitor the distance from the lid of the softener do the bottom and alert when the distance to too far.

Raspberry Pi Camera with Pan Tilt

I was inspired by +John Ellis's posting about his super cool garage security project to add more video and automation to my Pi projects.  He used a webcam in his project like I did in the Frankenfeeder project.  But I wanted to play with something new and hearing all the excitement around the camera module for the Raspberry Pi I thought I would take a look at it.
UPDATE: Step by Step tutorial version is online

Wind Chimes (Arduino, Raspi, and Magnets!!)

Arduino Uno Talking to Raspi via Serial

I'm going to do a quick post on another project I'm working on.  This is not complete yet, but I'll share my progress to date.

Here's the concept:
I'm building a wind chime that does not actually chime, well, acoustically that is.  Instead, it will allow me to play any sound for a chime instead of a metal or wood clunking sound.  I will capture the "striking" of a "chime" (yes lots of quotes) using analog sensors on the Arduino, and then communicate a command to the Pi via a serial line. I am using the Arduino for it's analog pins and its ability to sample incredibly fast.  I'm using the Pi to play sounds simultaneously (Nope, there is no simultaneous audio shield for the Arduino).  Pi audio is a longer subject worth of its own post. But the audio you hear in the video below will not be the finished product.

Frankenfeeder Part III

Pi stuff and Reassembly

This is Part III, Part II is here.

The Pi and what you can do with it is a deeeeep subject.  I'll just stick to the highlights.  Turning on/off GPIO pins, high level Wifi and sundry, and the script.

GPIO Control

Wiring Pi by Gordon @drogon, is an excellent project for low level Pi IO control.  Actually his whole site is just pure awesomeness if you have the time to read.  Anyway, I followed the instructions on downloading and installing Wiring Pi on my Pi.  I've heard rumors this is included in the base distro now, but you might want to check your version of the distro to be sure.
With the wiring pi package there is a binary, the gpio util, that allows you to issue command line commands to see the state of the pins and turn them high/low.

Frankenfeeder Part II

Pi Controlled

This is Part II of the frankenfeeder project.  Part I is here.

So how to close a circuit with a Pi.  Simple, use a relay.  A relay's job is to close (or open) a circuit when current is applied to it.  (a nice illustration is here where I borrowed the image) So just pop a relay onto a PI GPIO pin and off we go right?  Nope.

Frankenfeeder - Part I

Kick off:

A while back my folks moved to town in their retirement to be close to their mess of kids and grandkids.  It's been great having them closer and in our daily life.  My dad and I decided to spend a little time each week just geeking out with something completely unrelated to our jobs (he failed to retire properly) to rest our minds from the daily patterns.  He is a pseudo-retired pastor and I do Cloud Computing.  But we both enjoyed and wanted to learn more about hobby electronics or just making stuff.

For our first project we decided to create something that would allowed my dad to feed his dogs remotely if he and my mom were out gallivanting (technical term) about.  Don't worry, the dog door allows for the post-processing to occur safely.

We did some research and found this cool project by Amanda Ghassaei:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Twitter-Controlled-Pet-Feeder/