61–70 of 78 posts
My wife doesn't have an HN account, but I showed her this article and here's her comment... Great article! As a behavior analyst, let me name the research-supported behavioral interventions used here - stimulus control (pairing the word "light" with the behavior), most-to-least physical prompting (forcing the paw on the light), and differential reinforcement (reward for pressing the light; no reward for not pressing…
That program looks so simple. Never wrote a program for an Arduino before but I guess its time now.
Funny as it is, you'll be spending more time figuring which components to buy and which ones you actually need. And eventually figuring out how to build enclosures/boxes for you projects. Power supply also seems to be a difficult topic to get right if you're building wireless projects. There are tons of examples, tutorials, libraries available for Arduino, and keep in mind once you're done with prototyping you can ju…
Is there any evidence the Dog is actually aware that he's "texting (or otherwise sending) a selfie" -- or even knows what a selfie is -- in any meaningful sense? "How I taught my dog to thwack his paw on a big red button in response to a keyword signal" might be a better title.
"How I taught my p-zombie to look things up in a giant room filled with books in Chinese, using the Twilio API"
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That's a pretty decent idea for a project, but I would have instead hooked into the buzzer signal. The author over-complicated his solution, but that doesn't make it invalid.
My landlord wouldn't love me very much if I started taking apart my dryer to hook a mysterious wired object to the buzzer...
http://www.instructables.com/id/Washer-Dryer-Laundry-Alarm-u...
it uses an accelerometer to detect the motion of the washer. no need to dissect your large home applicances!
Cheap stylish wooden boxes for cheap is the biggest thing about this. Definitely will consider cigar boxes for my next project.
I've also had luck with 3.5" HD enclosures, they were as cheap as the drive without enclosure and with a bit creativity make for very nice looking enclosures for electronic projects. Another pro-tip I picked up is using match-boxes for storing electronics (resistors, connectors, small modules). They are cheap and you can tape/glue them together to create arrays of small boxes. The sides are clear thus perfect to writ…
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Yeah, i love twilio, but its value is in integrating with legacy services or customers who are stuck on old technologies. Using it to build new services around SMS/MMS that don't need to be built on SMS seems a little backwards. "so we take this awesome system, it takes pictures that we upload it to dropbox, a perfectly acceptable destination for pictures. and then, for some strange reason, instead of sending an emai…
Both of you missed something big about SMS/MMS: It's not really a messaging system, it's a push notification system that everyone who has a smartphone is subscribed to. You probably have a phone that can accept MMS, and a corresponding phone number. Lets say I turn this into some kind of guard dog system (bear with me). Imagine someone wanders onto my property. I'd rather get a text/mms than an email which might get…
You can't have push notifications for certain subjects or email addresses? If you're going to make home security part of this, you might as well set up your email to be accommodating to it as well. If you're gonna use email.