The following are some project ideas that I have. It is mostly meant as a reminder to myself what has been going on in my mind and a place to store links relevant to them if I ever get around to doing something with them.
Weather Station
I would like to create my own weather station. Based on an Atmega328 chip with a wind sensor made out of a low drag CD-ROM motor, temperature and humidity, light and barometric sensors. It could record data on a micro-SD card, and/or send it through a wireless connection to a computer. As I have a bunch of CYWM6935 breakout boards lying around, those could be used for the wireless connection, but with the multitude of IoT devices it might be worth it to just connect a simple WiFi device to the Atmega328 for data logging to the base station. For power I would like to have it run on a LiPo battery and a small solar panel using Adafruits Solar LiPo charger that I have lying around.
Home security system
We are living in quite a remote place. It is a great place to live, but since a big part of our life is outdoors and our house is quite open and made from natural materials for the most part, it is quite vulnerable to thieves when we’re not around. One way is to turn things into a bunker, hire a guard and get the meanest of dogs we could think of, but I don’t really like that solution. I’d rater do something smart with electronics to protect us. Especially since any thieve who might be interested in us is probably quite poor and uneducated and just out for a quick buck to spend on gambling or booze, it doesn’t have to be too tamper proof. What I am thinking now is a few contact sensors on sensitive cabinets/boxes, maybe a ultrasonic distance sensor to detect people coming in the door and a motion sensor to warn people early to sod off, and a camera somewhere to record a face. I have a beaglebone black lying around, which could work very well as the central nervous system for it all. With something like the Amazon IoT web services or RabbitMQ Cloud, in combination with a WiFi and/or 3G dongle (fail over?) I could connect it to the internet and get notifications on my cellphone or elsewhere. Maybe the camera data could be stored in the cloud as well, possibly triggered by the motion sensor. A local alarm could warn anyone up to no good. Unlocking could be in many ways, but I am quite taken by the idea of using my cellphone with some kind of backup in case I loose it or it runs out of battery to turn it off. A small servo could also drive a pin for a lock to void the necessity of needing keys.
Information Overload Filter
I have been experimenting with Bayesian filters in combination with the natural language toolkit and automatic text tagging to make sense of the information overload I am getting. With these tools I would like to automatically assign tags to texts (from news feeds, Facebook, blogs, etc). I can then train a Bayesian filter to only show those articles with interesting combinations of tags, and filter out the rest. If it works well, it would greatly reduce the time spent on Feedly and other services skipping over articles that I really am not interested in.