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In an age where the high street is saturated with expensive gadgets that bombard every consumer that wanders down it, clever electrical engineers know there’s always a better and cheaper way to make your home a better and safer place to live, rest and play in.
Here, Gadget Freak presents 7 DIY designs that your home can’t be without.
Some fridges are always alarmed
A fridge that’s alert for midnight snacks. When you’ve popped in your fridge alarm, getting peckish in the middle of the night and forgetting to close the door, along with escalating electricity bills, will be a thing of the past. Italian inventor Flavio Dellepiane has designed a 3V battery-powered fridge alarm that beeps if you open the door for more than 20 seconds. When the fridge lamp illuminates, the alarm’s photo resistor lowers its resistance, the IC starts counting down and after a preset delay the piezoelectric buzzer beeps for 20 seconds.
Pete decided to give his lamp a facelift
Making an ordinary lamp a work of art. Seeing great potential in a normal, off the shelf product, Pete Griffiths designed a circuit he popped into the lamp to give it a new lease of life. His design combines a PIC and three constant current buck converters to create the RGB LED controller. This controller drives the high power 350 mA LEDs using PWM to control the LED brightness. By driving the red, green and blue LEDs with varying pulse widths the controller can generate up to 16 million colours using fades, strobes and static effects. Who says you can’t give the humble lamp a nip and tuck?
An accurate PC thermometer you need all year round. Award-winning designer Alberto Ricci Bitti designed this simple microcontroller-free DS1621 PC thermometer that requires no calibration. It’s so cheap and simple because all you need is the sensor IC, a voltage regulator and a handful of diodes and resistors. It can be plugged into any free serial port and the temperature is shown on the Windows taskbar. Lucky for us, Alberto’s friends all asked for a PC thermometer of their very own, so he decided to release the build instructions into the wild. A cheap and simple PC thermometer? Now that’s hot. Or should we say cool?
Guido knew the secret to a perfect cuppa
It’s all in the timing. So he designed a battery-powered tea timer with a built-in LED display that will brew a perfect cup of tea every time. It’s simple: just fix a tea bag on the tea timer’s extension arm, place a mug of hot water underneath and push a button according to how strong you like your tea. The microcontroller-operated 5V circuit provides a servo motor with control pulses to lower and raise the arm and the power supply is switched off automatically via FET. Now the only thing you have to worry about is Tetley’s or Earl Grey?
From Alan Parekh’s tome of knowledge, comes the stair lighting kit. The lighting control unit is microcontroller-based. The stair lights are connected to the control unit and an infrared transmitter and receiver are utilised at the top and bottom of the staircase to generate a beam of invisible light. When a person walks across the ray of light, the lighting control unit triggers the staircase lights to turn on. The controller launches a soft start to the lights so they turn on nicely rather than disturb the whole house with a floodlight. The controller also keeps track of which beam was broken and turns off the light after the person has walked past. The lights fade out slowly to provide an aesthetically pleasing effect.
CMOS quad Schmitt makes gardening easy
Plant watcher ensures your plants won’t go thirsty. This is the gadget green fingers across the globe have been waiting for. Flavio Dellepiane put together a plant watering watcher that flashes an LED at a low rate when the soil in the pot plant becomes too dry. Adjusting the 50k 10mm cermet trimmer allows the plant watering watcher the flexibility to adapt to different soil and pot combinations. With extremely low 3V power consumption, there’s really no reason for your plants to get anything less than five-star treatment. Put your feet up this summer and let the watering watcher take the guess work out of your plant’s next drink.
Sleep easy with the night light saver
Say hello to the no EMI and no battery night light saver. The night light saver can be attached to a lamp in your very own home. It uses a 2051 chip and a small triac. The night light saver is inexpensive, easy to install and will help you save energy in the home.
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