Schlagwort: Home Hacks

  • Host the best BBQs ever with home automation

    Host the best BBQs ever with home automation

    Reading Time: 3 minutes
    Host the best BBQs ever with home automation

    Everybody loves a good BBQ. Getting your family and friends together on a long summer day and evening, cooking delicious food and having a great time as smoke drifts through the air — it’s the perfect weekend activity.

    BBQs can also be stressful, however. Anyone who has ever tried to host one will know the challenges of managing multiple meats at once, trying to avoid any overcooking (or undercooking) disasters, and keeping track of all that equipment.

    Automation can help run your BBQ much more smoothly, minimizing any mishaps and making sure everyone has the best experience possible. In this article, we’ll look at how home automation can improve the BBQ experience and share some examples from Arduino’s Project Hub.

    How home automation improves BBQs

    • Keep track of different items. Automation makes it easier to manage multiple meats and other food items at the same time, notifying you when something is ready so you don’t get overwhelmed by tasks and neglect any of your cooking.
    • Stay on top of temperature by measuring each piece of food and ensuring it’s at the perfect point.
    • Create a more welcoming outdoor area with things like automated lighting, heaters, and even a smart garden.
    • Easy cleanup with robots and other tools to leave your grill and other tools sparkling clean.

    Some project examples from Arduino

    Temperature Controled Charcoal Smoker

    Arduino community member Duncan Barbee knew that the most flavorful way to grill is to use charcoal to heat your smokers. While propane and electric smokers give you better temperature control, they lose that unique and delicious charcoal flavor.

    But charcoal heaters present many challenges. You need to constantly stay on top of the temperature, adjusting the vents on a regular basis to make sure everything is just right as the charcoal level changes in the smoker.

    Barbee wanted to build a project that gave him the best of both worlds — the tasty charcoal flavor with the ease and convenience of an electric or propane smoker. He developed a controller that monitors the temperature in the smoker and automatically adjusts the airflow to the charcoal to maintain the correct temperature at all times, allowing him to sit back and relax as the perfect charcoal-based BBQ unfolds.

    Smokerduino

    Robert Korn had already created a sous vide controller using Arduino and a handful of other components, with great success. He chose to apply the same model to a smoker and devised the Smokerduino, which ensures perfectly cooked meat every time with minimal effort from the chef.

    Alexa BBQ/Kitchen Thermometer with IoT Arduino and ePaper

    Roger Theriault and his wife enjoy making cheese and yogurt at home, but this is a long process involving a thermometer and lots of waiting around. To cut some steps out, he built his own smart thermometer to monitor the temperature of the food and beep when a specific temperature was reached and it was time for the next step.

    However, when the device stopped working, Theriault decided to upgrade it instead of simply fixing it. The new iteration of the thermometer uses Alexa devices too, enabling him to easily monitor and control everything cooking in the kitchen or outside in the smoker.

    The way it works is fairly straightforward — just give Alexa an instruction and it will find the recipe and instruct the given device to start from step one of that recipe. It also draws on the data from the recipe to monitor the temperature and make any notifications or adjustments needed.

    Better BBQs with Arduino

    Monitoring and controlling cooking is one of the most useful and rewarding use cases for home automation. Arduino’s products make it possible to assemble detailed and advanced projects to take your BBQs to the next level.

    Check out the project hub for some more inspiration or visit the home page to learn more about how Arduino works.

    The post Host the best BBQs ever with home automation appeared first on Arduino Blog.

    Website: LINK

  • Humidify the air around you with home automation

    Humidify the air around you with home automation

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    Humidify the Air Around You with Home Automation

    Keeping the air in your home in the right condition is incredibly important. Your home is your safe haven from the outside world, a place where you can control your environment and enjoy the comfort and peace of a secure space.

    Humidifiers are an excellent way to keep the atmosphere of your home in exactly the right balance for your health and enjoyment. Traditional humidifiers work well, but automated humidifiers can work even better.

    In this article, we’ll look at why humidifiers are so useful and how you can use home automation to create your own smart home humidifiers.

    Why home humidification is important

    • Stay moisturized. Humidifiers keep the air in your home sufficiently full of moisture, which helps counteract the effects of artificial heating systems. This prevents dry skin — especially on the lips and hands — as a result of dry indoor air.
    • Keep your sinuses in good condition. Dry air, over time, can cause your sinuses to become irritated. It’s a feeling most people are aware of and can result in discomfort, headaches, and even nosebleeds. A good humidifier helps avoid this, ensuring your sinuses are lubricated and healthy at all times.
    • Make it easier to recover from illness. The right humidifier can ease the path to recovery from illnesses like the flu or a cold by helping your sinuses recover.
    • Minimise snoring. A noisy bed partner, over many months, can be the source of much stress and frustration. Snoring is a complex issue that can be difficult to solve, but a good humidifier can often ease the problem significantly by providing enough moisture to keep the throat and nose clear.

    Examples of projects

    Automatic Humidifier

    Living in Boston, Arduino user chenwei19940207 found that the air was so dry, especially in the evening, that a solution was needed. As a result, they decided to develop their own humidifier to turn on and off automatically, ensuring a consistent level of humidity in the air all year round and all day long.

    Smart Humidifier

    Healthy air has three components — be fresh, clean, and the right humidity. The third factor is important because humans use evaporative cooling (sweating) to rid our bodies of excess heat. This is why humans can be comfortable and safe within a fairly wide range of humidity — between 30 to 70 percent at a push.

    But we still struggle at lower levels of humidity. It can result in great discomfort, trouble breathing, and aggravated allergies, and anything below 20% humidity is especially difficult. As a result, it’s best to keep our homes at the right level of humidity.

    Recognizing this, Arduino member Md. Khairul Alam developed a project to keep the home sufficiently humidified year round. His device senses the temperature and humidity in your home, checks if it is in the ideal humidity range, and turns on the humidifier to ensure you stay in the right zone.

    Arduino Humidifier Control

    Arduino “having11” Guy developed this project to regulate the humidity of their home. It involves attaching a dht11 temperature and humidity sensor to an Arduino, letting you modify your humidifier in a way that allows you to automatically turn the device on whenever the humidity in your home drops below a set level, for example 30%.

    You also have the ability to set a “cooling down” period, avoiding the humidifier becoming overheated.

    NOTE: It’s worth noting that this project uses high voltage and amperage, and doing any of these steps incorrectly could result in serious injury or even death. So be careful and don’t attempt this without any prior experience or skill!

    Build a healthier smart home with Arduino

    With Arduino, controlling the humidity of your home is just the beginning. Our Project Hub is filled with examples of home automation projects, using all kinds of technology to make their homes smarter, safer, and easier to live in.

    Check out our site to find out more uses for Arduino and how you can get started with your own home automation projects.

    The post Humidify the air around you with home automation appeared first on Arduino Blog.

    Website: LINK

  • Streamline your morning routine with home automation

    Streamline your morning routine with home automation

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    Automate your Morning Routine with Home Automation

    Let’s face it — mornings can be tough. Even the earliest risers and the most enthusiastic morning larks sometimes struggle to drag themselves out of bed and attack the day. The good news is that automation can always save things.

    By using home automation wisely, you can save time in the morning, cut out tedious tasks, and start the day on the best possible note. In this article, we’ll look at why automation works so well in the morning and share some morning projects from the Arduino community.

    Morning is the best time for automation

    Home automation has a ton of benefits at all times of the day, but it’s especially useful in the morning. That’s because the first few minutes and hours of the day are usually where we need to save time the most.

    Automation helps save precious seconds off your AM routine by helping you rise earlier, save time on important morning tasks, and manage your time better. As a result, you get less stress and more time to focus on enjoying the start of the day.

    Now, let’s take a look at some projects from the Arduino community that members built to improve their own mornings.

    Morning automation examples from the Arduino community

    Alarm clock

    Arduino member galoebn had had enough of struggling with slow, difficult mornings. To solve the problem, they made an alarm clock that really worked.

    The clock uses a motion sensor, so it notices if you get back into bed after hitting the snooze button. If so, the alarm will go off again, but if you stay out of bed for a certain period of time, the alarm won’t sound anymore.

    Best of all, this project is fairly easy to construct at home with just a few components including a clock module, a motion sensor, a buzzer, a small button and an Arduino.

    Coffee machine

    In the morning, there are few things better than a steaming cup of coffee to get the day started. However, coffee takes time to brew, and there’s no feeling more frustrating than realizing you don’t have enough time to prepare your morning cup of Joe.

    Arduino member Thomas sxt was so tired of this feeling that he decided to build his own automatic coffee machine to take care of this part of the morning routine, ensuring a hot cup of coffee was waiting for him every morning.

    The machine works via an app, allowing you to choose your coffee size, and can even be controlled by voice.

    Curtain control

    Throwing your curtains wide open is a great way to start the day. Our bodies are programmed to respond to natural light in the morning, and it helps us wake up naturally and get energised for the day ahead. Of course, climbing out of bed to open the curtains is less fun.

    Arduino member JayV decided to solve the problem by designing curtains that automatically open in the morning and close in the evening according to your pre-set instructions. The project also comes with a manual override, just in case you want to take a mid-day nap.

    Your curtains need to be the right design to work (JayV’s old curtains had a simple looping rope) but it should work with most models. 

    LUMOS: Smart lamp for better sleep

    Smart lighting isn’t just about creating a more comfortable home environment, it can also give us great control over our daily routines and even improve our health. 

    Unfortunately, in today’s world, we are surrounded by sources of blue light. It bombards us from our TVs, smartphones, and laptops, and this blue light causes our bodies to produce more cortisol which makes it more difficult to fall asleep. More than 20% of the world population is sleep deprived, and this is very likely linked to the fact that many people spend huge portions of their day around unnatural blue light sources.

    To tackle this problem in his own home, Arduino community member Jonty came up with the LUMOS smart lamp. The lamp mimics the natural light of the sun as it passes overhead each day, generating bright blue light in the morning and warmer amber light (which has been shown to encourage melatonin production and get us ready for sleep) in the evening.

    This lamp even pairs with WiFi and uses machine learning to adjust the light to match your sleep schedule.

    Have better mornings (and evenings) with Arduino

    Arduino makes it possible to gain greater control over your environment and optimize your daily routine to be as healthy and productive as possible. The ideas shared in this article are just the start — with the right set of components and some basic knowledge there’s almost no limit to what you can do with home automation.

    To find out more, visit our homepage or browse the Arduino Project Hub for inspiration!

    Boards:Arduino CloudIoT Cloud
    Categories:ArduinoHacksHome AutomationHome Hacks

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  • Automate your home on the cheap with this Arduino setup

    Automate your home on the cheap with this Arduino setup

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    Arduino Team — July 6th, 2021

    All too often, those who are new to Arduino struggle with creating large projects due to a lack of experience and components. This can be frustrating, but Instructables user MAKE_IT WITH_ME decided to tackle this issue by designing a super cheap way to automate home circuitry from just a single Starter Kit. His build uses a single Arduino Uno, although it can easily be swapped with something like a Nano or Mega, along with a stepper motor/driver, servo motor, threaded rod, and an IR receiver + remote combo. 

    The main portion of the home automation setup is the stepper motor assembly, and it is responsible for moving the servo motor back and forth across the bank of switches. Due to the stepper motor not knowing its initial position relative to the device, it must be “homed” or set to its zero position by moving right until the edge hits the limit switch. When a request to turn a switch on or off is received from the IR remote, the Arduino board decodes the instruction and converts the command into the number of steps the stepper motor must take to reach the desired location. After the servo moves and flips the switch on or off, the entire thing returns to where it started from. 

    To read more about the process of how this device was constructed and how it was programmed, you can check out its Instructables write-up here.

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