How have you customized your life -- electronically?

I have installed two Radio Shack motion detector light systems, one over the garage door and one to replace the front entry light.

I have an unfinished project (waiting for my next retirement, layoff, or firing) to build a PIC-based lawn sprinkler controller that will link to a PC by some means (USB, serial port, wireless) and allow me to set watering schedules by a graphical calendar program running in the PC.

Reply to
Richard Henry
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Klutz ?:-)

So you admit you're a non-technical person? I manage to use the two buttons to control five different mug sizes.

I love my Keurig coffee machine. My wife prefers tea and I prefer near-espresso-strength coffee. It serves us well.

Yeccch!

...Jim Thompson

Reply to
Jim Thompson

We have a steel kettle, a cute yellow porcelain coffee pot (I collect coffee pots) and a ceramic drip cone. With a bag of Peet's coffee and the local Hetch Hetchy water, it makes as good a cuppa as you can get anywhere in the world, which is approximately 10 times better than you can get anywhere in Britain.

But there's a trick: before you put the Mellita filter into the drip cone, place a toothpick sideways in the bottom of the cone. That keeps the filter from plugging the outlet hole and it drips much faster, and faster dripping makes better coffee. After, we compost the used coffee, the filter, and the toothpick.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Our garden has a drip system with one 24 volt solenoid valve wired to a hand-twist mechanical timer switch. It takes about 400 milliseconds to give it a twist and get it going; twist harder if you want more water. No programming, and it's been absolutely reliable for about 10 years now.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Mine is not a Keurig. Maybe I'll look for one.

Reply to
Richard Henry

My "new" (it replaced the 2 80's-vintage 6-station controllers that came with the house and never worked reliably) 12-station controller is now in the "Off" position, where it will be for about a week since we are having a rainy weekend.

Reply to
Richard Henry

There's a newer version than mine, with _3_ cup size buttons.

Keurig is a "K-cup" cartridge-type of machine.

There are other brands that use paper-enclosed coffee inserts. These dry out quickly, losing flavor.

...Jim Thompson

Reply to
Jim Thompson

My wife is blind. Yes, there are kitchen timers which are intended for the blind, but the one we had couldn't announce the time remaining- and you couldn't even check that you'd remembered to start it.

So I made one which gives different tone of beep depending on whether you've pressed the minute, ten-minute, or hour setting button, and which speaks the time remaining when you press a button. That's one PIC, one speech-storage chip, and a CMOS D-type.Current when not running is microamps.

I also made talking kitchen scales; disembowel cheap electronic scales, find a signal relating to weight, and again use a PIC and a speech storage chip. (Yes, you can get such things off the shelf.)

This has been a piece of own-trumpet-blowing by an old git in the east of England. Thank you for your forbearance.

-- Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.

Reply to
tersono

I have a motion sensor controlled light in my driveway, another by the back door and one in the hallway, so I don't fall while looking for a light switch at night. Being half awake while leaning on a cane in the dark, is dangerous.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

It's good to remind the electronics nut that there are other ways to solve problems!

-- Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.

Reply to
tersono

We have a machanical twist timer. It ticks while it's running and goes DING! when it's done. You can locate it in the dark and easily feel the pointer position and get a good idea of how much time is left. In

15 years, we've never had to replace the batteries.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

On Thu, 19 Apr 2007 21:38:54 -0700, John Larkin put finger to keyboard and composed:

I recently went shopping for a washing machine. I only saw one that didn't have a microcontroller. As an engineer I can appreciate the gadgetry, but as a tech I also understand the repair cost. No fancy electronics for me, thanks.

- Franc Zabkar

Reply to
Franc Zabkar

On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 04:05:24 GMT, DaveC put finger to keyboard and composed:

Admittedly it's very trivial, but my most recent fun with electronics was to hack a $40 DVD player based on a Sunplus chipset. I added a USB port to it and replaced its "Tevion" banner with a photo of my own.

- Franc Zabkar

Reply to
Franc Zabkar

? "John Larkin" ?????? ??? ?????? news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

I made an automatic watering system with a Theben digital timer, 2 single phase 220 V relays and 2 solenoid valves,1/2 " and 3/4".The smaller gauge is for watering the lawn with sprinklers, and the large for the rest with dripping system.Working for more than 3 years flawlessly.There are Gardena battery powered watering timers but they need servicing almost every year.

-- Tzortzakakis Dimitrios major in electrical engineering mechanized infantry reservist dimtzort AT otenet DOT gr

Reply to
Tzortzakakis Dimitrios

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Senseo.

There's also Tassimo, which is closer to a K-Cup... they're also bar-coded so that the machine "knows" what it's making -- hence the Tassimo machines can make lattes and hot chocolate (with milk) besides the water-based drinks that the Keurig can.

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

In theory the electronic ones should be more reliable... the traditional washing machine timer, with a bazillion little detents pressing spring-leaf switches *will* fail, it's just a question of when.

In practice I wouldn't be surprised if the electronic ones weren't particularly more reliable. The fact that anyone can easily sit down and building a washing machine controller or similar in a matter of weeks now has unfortunately often made reliability something of a secondary concern to manufacturers, it would seem.

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

Pretty much guaranteed that *every* washing machine will fail, given enough time, electronically-controlled or not, the prime cause of failure being vibration in the spin cycle inducing strain in the mechanical components, but electronic circuit boards are as susceptible, if not more so, to mechanical strain.

Personally, having kept our vintage (100% mechanical) washing machine going FAR past it's reasonably-expected lifespan by maintenance as-and-when, seems to me that the major causes of failure/stoppage are A) Blockage of the outlet impeller by items that slip between the inner and outer drums, ie. coins from pockets, safety pins, items of jewelery, etc., and B) component fracture, ie. inner drum mounting brackets, rubber glands, and/or fractures/disintegration in the concrete damping blocks.

The old cam-driven microswitch program controller has much to recommend it; it stands up to vibration reasonably well, is cheap, and the only thing that is likely to disrupt its program is contact failure (which is easily dealt with by a can of servisol/WD40) or, at an extreme, dismantling and going over the contacts with a nailfile/emeryboard. Any weak solder joint in the "electronic" equivalent, subject to the same mechanical forces, can produce an "intermittent" failure mode that can be an absolute bastard to track down, and result in many hours of fruitless investigation.

All-in-all, I'd side with the "appropriate-technology" camp. If it does what you want it to do, with the minimum of fuss, then it's the right product. The more "knobs-and-whistles" there are, the more there is to go wrong. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Cheers, Pete.

Reply to
Pete Wilcox

Hi Pete,

I think you make a good case that, if you're stuck out in the boonies somewhere, electro-mechanical washers are probably the way to go, since when they do break you'll have a pretty good shot at being able to repair them yourself. :-) Electronically controlled machines... not so much (ok, maybe not at all...).

It just seems to me that with appropriate quality control and design (including isolation mounting, etc.), you should be able to design a washing machine controller board with an MTBF of, say, 100 years.

Electronically controlled washers are typiclaly a lot more water and electiricity efficient than the old "fixed cycle" designs. This might not rise to the level of "broken," (although Jim's leftist weenie greenies would disagree :-) ) but it's close enough that newer machines can be considered "valid" improvements, IMO.

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

I have a Kenmore He3t front loader, which is identical internally to the Whirlpool Neptune that was the subject of numerous class-action suits. Despite having to redesign the drain mechanism to a gravity feed, I would not trade this washer for a top load. It is so superior to a top load, I won't even consider putting my clothes in one any more. The wash job is fantastic.

When it detects an unbalanced load during spin, it has a neat algorithm to spin at a low rpm which redistributes the load so it is balanced. When it spins up, you often cannot tell there is anything in the drum, it is so well balanced. When it cannot balance the load, it spins anyway. The resulting vibration shakes the floor and wakes up my neighbours, so I no can longer do laundry at night.

I agree an intermittent connection can be a huge waste of time. But in this case, if there were any weakness in the solder joints or connectors, they would have fallen off long ago. So they must have pretty good quality control to ship so many and have so few failures in the controller.

The forums are full of people taking about problems they are having with these machines, and I can see how a lot of them can occur. But they seem to have the connection problem solved.

Regards,

Mike Monett

Reply to
Mike Monett

Oh yeah?

jak

Reply to
jakdedert

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