About a year ago we (my roommates and me) started to think about a sideboard for our stuff in the entrance. Since we love to build furniture ourselves, we collected ideas and started to scribble. And here it is, first drawing (thank you Tefi!)
And the final version.
And the steps between.
Many thanks to Tefi, who made this project reality! Couldn’t have done it without you.
Today I finished listening my music collection.
The thing
When I started my bachelor thesis back in March, I thought I should listen each song in my collection, at least once. When I finished my thesis, I was something halfway through, so I decided to continue, with the goal to finish within 2013. And today I listened to the last song in my collection.
Why do I still have a music collection?
I think, music is something very personal. Music reminds me of people, places and situations. Most of the albums in my collection come with a personal story, a festival, a certain memory. Listening to my music collection is like stumbeling an old photo album. This is the reason why I don’t use services like spotify. If I would listen to any music I could just turn on the radio, I do that sometimes.
Why is this a thing?
Because music is much more than just a commercial product, some artists produce. I am interested in the story behind the music and the musician, or even better, if they tell me a story in theire songs.
Personally, I use a music server called Subsonic to listen to music everywhere. There are many apps for all kinds of plattforms. And I am not dependent on any commercial company.
This was in my mind since years, and because home-automation is everywhere. I’ve had many ressources to stumble upon. I startet with an infrared to ethernet device to remote controle my stereo and tv with my phone. My most recent project was to remotely open the entrance door to our flat, with great success.
An arduino microcontroller hooked up with an ethernet-shield and a self soldered ‘trigger-board’. The arduino and the ethernet-shield is no magic, you can find example code here and here. I simply run a dead-simple non-secure web server on arduino listening for 3 arguments, for each relais on my trigger-board one. One of the relais is connected to my door-buzzer. The arduino is on my local network reachable only via cable. My home server is hooked up to the arduino ethernet interface and on this server I host a publicly available, mobile optimized, secure and beautifully designed, web application – written in plain PHP using RedBeanPHP.
You can log in and open the door, wherever you are. One can now use the ‘add to homescreen’ feature on iOS and have a pseudo native door opener.
Since I wanted to play around a little, I created a unique, one-time-usage-link-generator. So I can invite friends over, send them my link and they can open the door exactly once.
// Generating a random string to create a unique URL and allow entrance once
function generateRandomString($length = 20) {
$characters = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz';
$randomString = '';
for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++) {
$randomString .= $characters[rand(0, strlen($characters) - 1)];
}
return $randomString;
}
Since I live in an old house, the doorbuzzer is not very reliable. So when I trigger the buzzer, my server-arduino-trigger system works like a charm, butte the door doesn’t open always at the first try.