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Show HN: Text Message turns on blender (youtube.com)

4 points by Madhav_ ↗ HN
Turning on the blender is obviously insignificant, but we did this as a proof of concept. Right now I'm getting it to work to unlock my door (I just have to machine the clamp). I've cut it down so it's one line of code started with an incron script. I can share it if there's any interest.

3 comments

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dkersten
That looks very complicated compared to what it needed to be. Can't find the link now, but there was a guy on hackaday or somesuch who connected the vibration alert to his car to start/unlock (don't remember which) it. So, get an old, cheap phone, take out vibration motor, connect to blender on/off toggle, then simply ring the phone and the blender starts. Its free too, because the call never has to go through.

Of course, doing it by sms the way this guy did means you can send it more complex commands.

Madhav_
That's pretty sick.

This is actually much simpler than it seems. It's just a microcontroller hooked up to the switch (just two wires). The version shown in the video costed much more than it needed to only because we didn't know what we were doing at the time. The whole package can be done wirelessly for ~$35. The benefit of this method is the expandability factor. It can be hooked up to almost anything.

The text message backbone is just a postfix mail server running incron which starts a bash script to parse the message.

dkersten
Yes, thats what I was thinking when I wrote the final sentence. The vibration method is simpler - but this way has many more uses and can be expanded. Great work either way!