This would be the first time I went snowboarding since my motorcycle wreck in 05. I have a bunch of blown out discs in my back and I’ve always been really afraid of the compression that comes with snowboarding or skiing. But, I decided to give it a try anyway.
Tim, myself, and my wife Maria went up the night before so we could take our time. It would be the first time my wife did any kind of winter sports.
Here’s Tim doing an impression of Sleeveless Joe the next morning. Tim actually work’s with Joe’s brother.
I had this problem where I wanted to be able to get into my garage after a bike ride, but my ancient garage door opener doesn’t have an outside keypad, it has a physical key lock. I dislike keeping my keys with me while bike riding so I wanted an alternative. After looking around trying to figure out how to install a keypad, I decided there was an easier way. I have an iPhone, and I always keep my phone with me on my bike rides in case I get hurt or something. I looked online for someone who has done this, and I found a guy who did but he relied on a bunch of nonsensical home automation software and hardware. It also depended on his computer to be running. I didn’t like that, relying on my iPhone to be working was risk enough.
So, what I did was to source a Modbus slave device with relay outputs. In my case I used a phoenix contact PLC with an ethernet card I got from my local distributor GCF-INC. This is way overkill but I had it lying around. The ONLY programming I had to do to the device was to set it’s IP address so I won’t go into detail about that.
The next thing I did was to purchase a $3 version of ScadaMobile from http://www.sweetwilliamautomation.com/ which allows me to send modbus commands over TCP/IP. Since my iphone is wifi enabled, and I put this PLC on my home’s ethernet all I had to do was tell the phone what the PLC’s IP address was, and send the command down.
Then I just added this little piece of code to open the garage door. Most of it is the ScadaMobile default code.
BOOLValue BOOL C1 ord:=206; sections:=”COILS”; write_access:=9; label:=”Open Garage”; comment:=”Open Sesame”; style:=”button”;
Basically, I’m sending a BOOL (on/off) command to coil #1 using a predefined “button” (momentary button).
The PLC then takes a pair of wires which are paralleled to the garage door open button in my garage, and upon pressing the iphone button the contact closes and the garage door opens. It’s not a total solution because I still need to go to my front door and disarm the house alarm, and there is a fire door in my garage that leads to the basement which I keep locked.
I made a video of how it works explaining this also. Enjoy.
Posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago at 4:28 pm. 3 comments
So pretty much everyone I know is booked on the same flight out to Vegas for the pair of weddings that weekend. Our friends Rich and Dawn are getting married on Sunday, and Phil and Ashley are getting married on Monday.
International Rally New York 2009 started off for me unlike any other rally I’ll ever attend. I actually got married the previous Sunday and my new wife and I were on a short vacation up in Newport Rhode Island. Thursday night we departed Rhode Island and headed down to rally HQ at the Villa Roma resort where we would conclude our honeymoon.
