Better Living Through MakerBot – Automatic Windows
MakerBot operator Ed Rodgers had a problem. He lives close to railroad tracks and the trains made a lot of noise when they rolled passed. What was his solution?
With some custom printed parts from on Sector67‘s MakerBot 3D printer, an Arduino, and a few other parts, he now has a smart home that will close its windows when a train passes by. The video above shows off his setup as well as the dramatic reduction in train noises when the windows are closed.
| Tagged with | ed rodgers, sector67 | 4 comments |
4 Comments so far
pipakin
Now all you need is a webservice or something that can tell you when trains are coming and you can close em before the train even gets there.
MakerBlock
@Pipakin: Nice idea! I could see building a scraper for a train schedule website, figuring out how long it would be before the train would be nearby, and closing the windows before it arrives. That would be AWESOME!
msmollin
@Makerblock & @pipakin: I have a friend who’s already doing that for SEPTA trains here in the philadelphia area. Built a scraper/parser that pulls data from the SEPTA website for it and puts it into JSON for his iOS apps: http://caffeinefish.com/trainboard
Adam White
Wicked!!
You could put a sensor down the tracks and use an Xbee to communicate back home. If you could detect the train down the track you’d get no noise at all.
There was a project someone did to detect airplanes above his house ( i think the spirit was to make sure they weren’t flying after the 11 pm bylaw or something of that nature. You might us a similar principle.
Adam