My friend Fishy got me a great Christmas present that I just now got hooked up and working. I thought some of you might get a kick out of it.

Backstory: I have a small house and I've turned its basement into a makeshift recording studio. I made my last album there, but I'm also doing recording work for other people there. So many weekends at this house are spent with band members and friends milling around, while the recording of individual parts is happening downstairs. And the house is small enough so that noise from upstairs gets picked up by the mics downstairs. As a result, I was frequently running upstairs to tell everyone to be quiet because I'm about to start tracking.

Witnessing this, Fishy got a brilliant idea and surprised me with a "Recording" sign for Christmas:



Now, the sign itself looks awesome, as you can see, but that's not the geeky part; the sign was just a lucky Ebay find. No, this is more than just a light-up sign.

First, Fishy found a company that does programmable USB relays and got one that he built into an AC electrical outlet box. Into this AC relay plugs the sign.

Then he wrote some client/server software in Java. The server software runs on my 24/7-uptime fileserver on my local network. Into this server plugs the USB relay. The client software runs on any machine on the network (such as my main recording PC). Whenever I want to illuminate the sign (such as right before I begin doing takes), I just click on an icon.

He's even programmed the software to blink the sign rapidly each time it turns on or off, to get the attention of anyone in the upstairs area.

It works like a charm. I spent most of the evening yesterday being Homer Simpson: "Sign goes on. Sign goes off. Sign goes on..."

That is really clever!

Thank you Tony for reminding me why I love this forum so much!

That is just the most geeky thing I have seen since the empeg TCP/IP doorbell

I feel like such a "normal" person right now, no one can ever now say I have too much geek going on in my home!

Cheers

Cris.

Oh god. We did that too.....I even got my boss to hack the piezo driver circuit from a "sound bomb" so I could drive it from a PWM. Our doorbell sounds like the "circus music".

We also had a rat downstairs in the back room, so rather than buy a rat trap, we fashioned one from wood, a bin, a solenoid, a home made pressure switch and a control board!

Life is good!

Any pics?

Of course Julf ranks pretty high in the geek royalty stakes given he uses Dallas iButtons to unlock the front door at his house.

Ahhh... you guys are all just pretenders! Now this guy is a real geek!

tanstaafl.

Trying to find a picture! Might be on my work PC.



We use those too at work...rather than buy in a system, we designed, built and has working and installed a iButton entry system before TI approved our NDA for their RFID chip which we were originally going to use!

Incidentally it's the same board that controls the door bell circus music. I did have it playing sound samples via a PWM, but the piezo driver out of the "sound bomb" uses transformers and they wont let through the frequencies unfortunately I wanted homer simpson as our doorbell!

No light switches in our building either, when the front door unlocks it flicks on the foyer lights. Each room has door sensors and PIR's which control lights in each room, they also broadcast their inputs over the TCP/IP network so that other units can make use of them if needed. Each room broadcasts it's occupancy state & temperature so that unit that controls the heating can turn on the valve and fire the boiler for that room!

Yes, we are geeks.

Anything you guys would be ready to share? I am happy with my iButton system apart from the fact that it is not networked with the rest of the house, but a standalone system.

The board we designed is this one:


It wasn't designed for iButton, but rather as a small general purpose controller....but we broke some IO out to a connector and the IO on the SAM7 can be configured for open drain, perfect!

Subsequently we made a small daughter board that plugs in and provides 8 button interfaces that are all "data" isolated from each other.

Board runs FreeRTOS and uses lwIP stack.

Is it a lack of ethernet connectivity that is why your current solution is isolated?

You have PM coming your way julf, I can't post the PDF publically because it contains some data that it shouldn't.

Sounds great - is it a commercial product?



Yes - the (early) stuff I am using has no provision for ethernet, or any sort of connectivity once it is programmed.



Many thanks!

That is excellent. I love it! Wish I had thought of that.

Many years ago, when I was still living at home - maybe 1988 - I had my room soundproofed for recording purposes and instead of a sensible plan like this, I added an intercom instead, connected to the kitchen so I could ask folks to be quiet (and conversely, so they could let me know when dinner was ready)

Not the best plan if you are sneakily entertaining, and your guest's foot accidentally knocks the mic on, broadcasting out loud to the parents just what is going on...

Ahh - thems were the days!

Heh- brings this to mind.