it's ad-hoc, breadboardy, and...

[solarbird]

...janky as fuck, but you know what else it is?



FUCKIN' WORKING MATE ☆*:.｡.ヽ(；▽；)ノ .｡.:*☆

Since it was built - we weren't the first owners - this house has had a disused and nonfunctional security system. But I wanted to use some of its sensors for other purposes, and I new at least some of them worked.

So I went at it to map all its sensors and figure out what was working, and what did and did not have built-in sensors, so I could hook them up to an Arduino board and with software on it and on one of the servers, report physical status of the house.

First thing I found is that some of the sensors were working but wired up wrong inside the box. One sensor wasn't wired in at all. Why not? Got me.

Second thing I found is that some of the sensors didn't seem to work at all no matter how you wired and/or tested them. And they were wired differently to some of the ones that were working - but not all of the ones that were working.

Of course, half the ones I wanted to use were amongst the ones not working. So despite being pretty sure I wouldn't be able to get them back up and running, I decided to investigate anyway, which is where I discovered 1) I could get them working and 2) they had never worked, and could never have worked, because someone, presumably new to the job, fucked up real bad at install time.

But your dirty socks can't stop me, and I did in fact get them working with more powerful magnets than standard, well enough to have some use if anyone wants to use the security system, and entirely well enough for my ventilation cooling purposes. So, y'know, go me and all that.

So now the vent system has direct knowledge of the state of a bunch of physical parts of the house. Hopefully more later! And since I did get shit working, I decided to see if I could get the old security system actually booted and running. Just once.


never seen the 'ready' light actually ready before

Aw yeah. READY TO ARM.

It should have turrets. It does not have turrets. But it should.

Bonus content: I started work on the permanent replacement interface for that patchwork of cables and experimenter board, it'll be much cleaner and more stable:



That's as far as I can go for the moment. The rest of the parts should get here Friday.

Comments

[desert_dragon]

Wow! You are magic!

[solarbird]

Arduino boards make physical interfacing so much easier. I've got a little code out there which will report the status of everything it's hooked up to upon request, and it spits it out as JSON data over a serial port. This makes it incredibly easy to use in PHP, which is what I'm using to write most of this.

Writing in PHP + arduino really feels a lot like ... 8-bit computers and joystick ports, just, you know, more powerful. I mean, two joystick ports on a C64 gave you 10 digital in, 4 analogue in, and +5V to work with. Meanwhile, Arduino boards give you 12 digital I/O pins, 5 analogue I/O pins, +5v, +3.3V, and a few other extra pieces too for good measure. But it's not that much more.

(The ability to output both digital and analogue on the Arduino board is a step up, absolutely. But I'm not using that for this project.)

A C64 could absolutely run the code I'm running on the Arduino board, if rewritten in BASIC. Absolutely. And it would still be fast.

Meanwhile, PHP is this absolute "let's take some C/C++ shit and make it lollertastic and so loose it feels like BASIC" nonsense so the linux side is just like poking around, reading in some values, doing some simple math, making it look pretty.

I never stopped coding after leaving Microsoft, but honestly, this is... just... enjoyable.

And really useful. That too. ^_^

[vatine]

never played around with Arduinos, but I have convinced my Raspberry Pi 3 (with a Unicorn HD hat) to do a smoking clover that, by a rough estimation, should take just over 72 hours to repeat.

Code written in Python, mostly because that's what the hat interface lib is written in. I may try looking through the code and rewrite it in Go. Not because it would be useful, but because it may be instructive.

[solarbird]

I had three third-party Arduino Leonardo boards sitting around from a kickstarter I backed ages ago, and it's more than capable of dealing with this kind of nonsense. Plus no worries about power loss issues, all that.

It really is basically just an extremely-trivial-to-use microcontroller. ^_^

[vatine]

Yep, at some point I should probably play around with them.

Hopefully, I'll get around to make my cryptographic nerdsniper. The idea is basically "512 switches, fed through the SHA-256 boxes, displaying on a 16x16 LED matrix". It should be pretty obvious that flipping switches lead to changes on the LEDs, in a non-predictable way. And, the theory goes, that will cause people to spend an inordinate amount of time, flipping the switches, trying to make patterns.

[solarbird]

That's hilarious.

You should totally build it.

[desert_dragon]

Joy thought she was done with coding when she moved into devops but her new job apparently requires her to do some code. I think she's missed it more than she was willing to say. She's diving in and learning new stuff. I miss it but unlikely to do anything unless I have projects. I feel like I've forgotten everything I ever knew about programming, computers or math!

[solarbird]

Oh christ, me too. Particularly the maths. But the software part certainly comes back when I start poking at it.

[gwydion]

You are incredibly impressive.

[solarbird]

It's just switches and simple maths, luv. xD

The closest thing to complicated in it is rounding to the nearest half degree in C. I was rather pleased with coming up with a single-line formula for that - and for conversion to C.

intval(($fpTempF-32)/1.8)+round(2*((($fpTempF-32)/1.8)-intval(($fpTempF-32)/1.8)))/2

(Or if you convert to C first)

intval($fpTempC)+round(2*(($fpTempC)-intval($fpTempC)))/2

[armiphlage]

wow!

[solarbird]

I really am rather enjoying this. It's a nice crinkly level of problem solving with nothing monolithically large and difficult to make it annoying.

[melchar]

It sure sounds impressive to me!

[solarbird]

Well, it works, that's what's important. ^_^