Door Lock (Complete)

The original motivation:

Both Noelle and I are pretty active people and we dislike bringing our room keys with us when we’re out running. Additionally, on really busy days, I sometimes forget my keys and I have to call the RA to unlock the door. 😦 I thought it would be extremely useful if we had a way to unlock our locked door. This project was inspired by our good MechE friend Mike, who had a card reader secured to the outside of his door. When he swiped his Duke card, a servo would unlock his door. Given that I already had the chance to tinker with the Arduino LCD shield, I thought I could modify his door-lock idea and replace the card reader with an LCD shield that asks for a four-number code.

Arduino Door Lock Code

This will be a quick post since I’m tired…I finished the code for the Arduino door lock.

(Watch the second video in HD to see the LCD display)

Two of every kind

Tonight I learned the significance behind having two of every kind of animal in the Noah’s Ark story, but in a different light…

I finally made some time to get back to the Arduino Door unlocker project. Yay! I thought I would start things off by testing out the Servo library and trying to get my servo to turn. Should be pretty simple, I thought.

Door Unlocker LCD Screen

The motivation:

My next project is to create a door-unlocker using an Arduino, an LCD shield, and  servos. When I’m out on the trails and when Noelle is at the gym we never bring our keys. As a result, we’re forced to leave our door unlocked. Although we live on the 5th floor and there is a very small probability that a thief would climb five flights of stairs, it still leaves me a bit nervous. (Especially after the series of laptop thefts that struck Kilgo this past semester…)

It would be great if we had a way to lock/unlock our door without having to bring our keys!

Arduino Harlem Shake

We’re using an Arduino to program the heating cycle of a reflow oven in my medical instrumentation course. One afternoon I skipped my run in order to give my body a break from the pollen. (Everything outside has a not-so-lovely coat of yellow…) I thought it would be fun to make a dancing man special character for the Arduino LCD. But Dancing Man quickly morphed into Harlem Shake.