For our first Arduino project, we hacked together a wifi-enabled door lock with some nifty features. After seeing cool projects like John Grathio’s secret knock and Billy Chasen’s ethernet unlocker, we were inspired to build our own. We combined the two ideas using an Arduino and a WiFly shield, a modified servo motor, and a few other things.

The end product is pretty cool and has these features:

• Unlock / Lock your door with your voice using Siri, an iPhone app, SMS, or a mobile web page (iphone app requires iOS developer account)
• Monitor whether the door is locked or unlocked from far away
• Get SMS messages when someone knocks on your door
• Unlock your door with a secret knock (hard-coded for now)

A demo of the iPhone app and secret knock in action:

The Siri hack works by creating a contact called ‘Door’, which is the phone number that we use to accept SMS messages like ‘open’ or ‘lock. We used Google app engine for a server component since it’s free for small usage like this. We then created an iPhone simple iPhone app to send unlock commands and monitor the door state. Twilio.com enabled us to send and receive SMS messages.

All the code we used is available on github here: https://github.com/cclaan/lockerino

* DISCLAIMER * Remember, we hacked this together for fun! – It’s not intended to protect your belongings or loved ones. The code probably has some bugs, might malfunction, or could easily be hacked by someone!

We intend to write up a more detailed how-to on Instructables.com, so stay tuned for that.

Also, this project is probably for advanced builders since your lock may be different than ours and require some custom solutions for mounting the servo to the lock. You may also have to modify our code a little to get the knock detection thresholds and servo angles correct, since they will be slightly different for everyone. Since it requires a web server, you will have to setup google app engine, which is free, but requires a little technical know how.

The total cost right now for all the parts ends up at around $170.. but if you have some of the common parts lying around it could be a lot less. Plus, we hear that the Arduino folks are introducing a cheaper WiFi shield in the next few months, since the one we use costs $90. Or you could use an Ethernet Pro that only costs $54.95 and saves you about 65 bucks, but requires a long ethernet cable.

Here are the parts we used for the project:

Here’s what you’ll need:

A fritzing sketch of how to wire it up:

Here’s a short video of putting it together, again, expect a more detailed tutorial to come soon.

Here’s how to modify a servo to read the position via its internal potentiometer:

Attaching the brackets to the servo:

Let us know what you think in the comments!

-Laan Labs

Here is the video on vimeo:

Since I plan on timelapsing more design sessions as more of a journal type thing, I though I’d share the process of making it, since it’s free. You could use a screencapture tool like screenflow or snapz pro, but they tend to cost money, and you don’t get to write fun command line scripts. (This technique has already been covered in a few blogs, but I didn’t find a consolidated version with everything I needed. See links at bottom for more info.)

To start your timelapse, you’ll type this script into a terminal window:
i=1;while [ 1 ];do screencapture -t jpg -x ~/Desktop/screencapture/$i.jpg; let i++;sleep 4; done

The script simply captures a screenshot every 4 seconds in this case and saves it into the “Desktop/screencapture” directory with a naming convention of 1.jpg, 2.jpg, and so on. Before you begin, make sure the directory exists, or it won’t work. Then change the sleep number (4 here) to however many seconds you want to wait between screenshots. The script will run infinitely so when you’re done capturing, make sure to Ctrl+C or close the window to stop the script.
If you need to pause, just Ctrl+C to kill the script, then to resume, change the “i=1″ to be whatever the last screenshot image number is plus one. So if the last image taken was “123.jpg” then set i=124 in the script.

When you’re done capturing, you will want to render all your screenshots into movie. To do this, you’ll need to have ffmpeg installed. To install, type each line into terminal…
cd /tmp/
svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg

./configure --enable-shared --disable-mmx
sudo make
sudo make install

A more detailed install explanation with more options is here:
http://stephenjungels.com/jungels.net/articles/ffmpeg-howto.html

Now, simply cd into the directory with all your images, and type:
ffmpeg -r 24 -i %d.jpg -b 15000k timelapse.mov

The number 24 represents frame rate, and you might want to adjust it based on how fast the movie should play. Lowering it to something like 18 will make the video longer, but possibly more watchable for a shorter process. The number 15000k is the target bitrate, and is pretty large because the video will be the size of your screen.

You will notice the video has some compression artifacts, I didn’t spend too long messing with ffmpeg options, but it should be possible to resize or increase the video quality by adding a few command line options to ffmpeg. You can read more here:
http://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC7

Note:
During capturing, I accidentally stopped capturing and restarted again in a different folder. If your image numbers somehow get messed up, you can use this script to rename them based on creation date. First move all images into one folder regardless of the name screwups. Now create a folder called “imgs”, and in terminal, cd to this directory and type this script…

x=1; for i in $(ls -r -t *jpg); do counter=$(printf %d $x); ln "$i" imgs/"$counter".jpg; x=$(($x+1)); done

Now all your images are named in a numbered sequence based on when they were created, and you can use the above ffmpeg script in this directory.

Post used for reference:
http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2009/12/take-timed-lapsed-screen-shots-from-terminal.html
http://www.carbonsilk.com/development/timelapse-video-mac/

NOTES: The landscape playback of videos no longer works (we were using an undocumented feature to allow videos to playback in landscape mode) — hopefully we will have it in the next update. Breaking News effect can sometime not display on first open — just change orientation of your phone and it will display properly. Thanks!

We are giving away $100 iTunes Gift card to a randomly selected video made with iVideoCamera using your favorite new effect that is shared on twitter (with TwitVid of course) with the hashtag #FXCONTEST. The contest starts now and runs until midnight saturday EST. To enter the contest simply make a video with iVideoCamera and share it on twitVid with the hashtag #FXCONTEST. Happy video’in

UPDATE: @robbydaly was selected as the contest winner. Congratulations!

What’s New:

• Improved frame rate in both quality settings
• Facebook bug fixed (finally, sorry) plus posting video to status stream
• Lots of fun effects
• 1x,2x and 4x Digital Zoom by double-clicking screen
• Virtually unlimited recording at high res and low res.
• No more save time in high quality
• SMS link sharing (experimental)
• Twitvid added for twitter sharing
• Help section
• Settings page

Effects Demo Video

Effects Pack #1
Vintage	Heat Vision
Snow	Breaking News

Effects Pack #2
Infinite Zoom	Vintage B&W
Night Vision	Scrolling Text

Effects Pack #3
Spy Cam	Solarize
Water Reflect	Title Maker

Effects Pack #4
Obama	Sparkles
Soft Glow	Dancing Hearts

Plus some hidden ones so you just might want to read up on the in app help and like unicorns….

We are looking for some reader feedback as to what the Grand Prize should be. We have partnered with Zacuto to be able to offer two runner-up prizes of the Zacuto zGrip Jr’s, but we are still considering options for the grand prize. The obvious choice is the zGrip Pro though we are thinking about a mini-projector, 3M Pocket Projector MPRO120 or Apple’s Time Capsule. So let us know what you want for your prize for the new year and vote below:

So last weekend when i was headed down to the boat cc told me to keep a look out for the red ballons – and by a very odd chance i got off a strange exit so i could go park under an underpass to check the accuracy settings of sending geotags on TD tweets. Driving a bit down the road what do i see.

Yes. A Red Balloon. I stopped. Talked geek with the darpa folks and tweeted about it (of course forgetting that geotagging was not enabled on tadwook) and then watching my iPhone die before i could enable a proper geotagged tweet. In the end i was a bit supprised how long it took teams to find all balloons. I am hoping a brand does a follow-up contest (clients are you listening?).

iVideoCamera was finally approved by apple last night after many many months of approval process fun. This app lets your record about 3 fps on any iPhone (well its for you 3g owners out there). I know it seems like we just put out this app (and we kinda did), but VideoSlides was a result of iVideoCamera not getting approved though we firmly believe the photo snaps to video with its three different capture modes warrants its own app.

Apple is definitely opening up what we can do with video capture (i.e. UStream and Knocking Video) so we expect to improve the frame rate and length of iVideoCamera in the next update.

NOTE: this version has an issue with YouTube audio encoding (it turns out they dont support 8KHz sampling rate) so if you upload your video there you won’t get sound, but facebook and vimeo work fine. We have submitted the fix to apple so the update should be in store shortly for sound on your YouTube Videos

We packed this app chucked-full-of-features:

• Add Music Tracks
• Adjustable frame rate
• Adjustable resolution
• Overlay capture mode
• Share to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, email, etc
• And just too many to list