Hack Like Heck: Andy G

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Name: agoodenberger

Element14 Community member since: March 6, 2018

Plan to Hack Like Heck: Authentic, interchangeable controls.

Notable projects: shortcut keyboard

More about the contestant:

How did you first get into electronics?

Well I have always had an engineering mind ever since I was little (my mother can attest to that), but I started making electronics projects for fun after I graduated with my Electrical Engineering Bachelor’s degree. Once my evenings were no longer consumed with my studies, I went looking for a new hobby. I had really enjoyed making my lab projects in college and decided that I could start making projects like that at home. At that same time, I also had the need/desire for a way to make turning my TV on easier. To watch anything on the TV, I had to press six buttons on my universal remote to turn on the TV, Cable Box and Surround Sound. Therefore, my first hobby electronics project was to use an IR receiver, IR LED, and Arduino Uno to make it so I only had to press one button. I programmed the Arduino (with the help of Ken Shirriff’s IRremote Library: https://github.com/z3t0/Arduino-IRremote ) to recognize the IR code of an unused button on my remote, and then send out the correct IR codes to turn on the three devices at once. After I had completed that project and saw how much easier my life had now become because of it, I was hooked.

Tell me about some projects you've done.

A few of the projects that I have done include: A RF remote that I can control a CD player boombox through the walls. A shortcut keyboard using a cheap USB numpad, a USB hub and an Atmega32u4. And a simple "Text-Me" button using only an ESP8266 connected to the internet to send a me text (without using another service like IFTTT or PushBullet). I have also refurbished a broken CNC engraver by replacing its brains with an Arduino running grbl firmware (https://github.com/gnea/grbl). But lately most of my projects have been centered around my Home Automation System using a Raspberry Pi and the open source software Home Assistant(https://home-assistant.io/).

With the dawn of the ESP8266 chip, I was able to make several sensors and devices to complement my home automation system. I have made a water leak detector, IR to MQTT sensor and my garage sensor. My garage door sensor provides me data on the status of both my garage doors, the temperature and humidity, the relative amount of light, if there is any motion, and whether or not the cars are in the stalls. You can see the video I made about it here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r5pLsRWH9g). With a home automation system, you really need some outputs from it as well. To do that as cheaply as possible, I have hacked several ECO Plugs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E54d9DRWYsM) as well as Sonoff devices (https://www.itead.cc/wiki/Sonoff). The first thing I did with them was to flash my own firmware into them to keep all of my data local and keep my house off the internet. I also soon realized that the basic sonoff would fit in a standard wall box, so I designed a 3D printed enclosure (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK1kWAeawQA) for it to replace an existing light switch. And in the spirit of open sourced, I uploaded the .stl files to Thingiverse to be freely downloaded. (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2632463)

What projects are you most proud of?

I would say that the 3D printer that I designed and built, is the project that I am most proud of. It was around the time the original Printrbot (Assembly - Printrbottalk Wiki) came onto the scene, and the cheapest desktop printer was around $600. I was inspired by the Printrbot's design and spent months creating the design in 3D CAD. I built the majority of it from common hardware store parts, an Arduino Mega, a RAMPS shield, plus a few bits off the internet. I learned an incredible amount from building my printer. Things like the value of designing parts to be taken are part and reassembled easily, allow for tolerances and for adjustments, as well as accounting to the wiring. There ended up being a lot of random wires on that build.

Project Update: March 23, 2018

     I have successfully realized my design ideas with the magic of 3D printing! There is still a lot to do, mostly soldering and programming.

Be sure to let me know what you think in the comments below ↓

Project Update: March 28, 2018

     The soldering and programming is now mostly complete. This thing is really awesome. I spent about 2 hours playing the Ledgend of Zelda on the SNES last night. And it still shows a full charge on the battery.

**Quick Tip**: if you are using GPIO to drive the audio on pwm0 and/or pwm1 (such as on the raspberry pi zero) and you are getting an awful buzzing or humming sound on top of the audio. Then you need to check out this video. After a bit of a wait, it describes adding audio_pwm_mode=2 to the /boot/config.txt file. This enables the sigma delta modulation on the pwm gpio. As soon as I added this to the config.txt file of my portable, the sound quality instantly improved ten fold, no other filter circuit needed.

Let me know in the comments if you have found this tip useful.

Want to know more? Ask me in the comments below and tag agoodenberger!