We’re going to look at 6 project ideas that you can carry out for your home. The idea is to have projects that are simple to carry out and that can improve your daily life or save you energy and therefore money. In today’s world, we use a lot of electronic equipment without even realizing it.
Whether it’s a toaster, refrigerator, washing machine or even a clock radio,
electronics are everywhere.
In the following projects, you’ll see various objects that can be easily automated by adding a little electronics.
A presence detector in a room can enable you to light the room only when a person is present, and switch it off when that person has left, without flipping a switch.
This can be very useful if you have children who forget to turn off the lights in their rooms, or if your hands are tied when you enter a room.
You’ll need a presence detector (PIR Sensor), an Arduino board, a relay and a lamp.
The presence detector is plugged directly into the Arduino board. It will also control your lamp via a relay. The relay acts as an intermediary between the lamp and the Arduino board, as it can only control 5V.
Always work with the power off, and take the necessary precautions.
How about a surveillance camera for your garden?
With Arduino, it’s possible: there’s a camera you can connect directly to the Arduino board.
What’s more, with a Wifi module, you can connect to the board to see what’s going on in your garden. Some Arduino boards already include a wifi module.
This is a difficult project to carry out, as it requires sending video from an Arduino board. One way of simplifying the project is to use a raspberry pi board, which is more powerful for processing a video signal and connects easily to your home’s wifi.
Always work with the power off, and take the necessary precautions.
How would you like to have a mailbox that warns you when a parcel or letter is inside?
With Arduino, you can connect your mailbox and find out what’s inside.
To detect the entry of a letter through the letterbox flap, you’ll need an infrared sensor. This will be pointed at the flap, and will return a distance. Once the shutter is open, the infrared sensor will point outwards and return a different value. This way, you’ll know that your shutter is open and that a letter has entered your mailbox.
The distance sensor is not precise enough to point directly at the letterbox flap.
To detect a parcel in a mailbox, you’ll need to detect the opening of the mailbox door and detect the weight variation in the mailbox.
To detect the opening of the mailbox, you can use a limit switch which you place at the door entrance.
Once you’ve detected the door opening, you can use weight sensors on a tray. The parcel will be placed on the tray (a plate covering a large part of the mailbox) and will therefore press on the weight sensors underneath, which will indicate a value greater than the weight of the plate, thus detecting the presence of the parcel.
For this project, you can connect the mailbox to a battery so you don’t have to run an electric cable through your whole garden!
How would you like to find your keys with a gps key ring?
On Arduino, this is possible thanks to a GPS module that you can control with your Arduino board.
You can then send the position of your USB key ring via Bluetooth or WiFi to your phone using a module.
Then, using an application, you can compare the GPS position of your phone and the key ring to see if you’re getting closer to the latter or not.
Would you like a weather station that tells you the temperature and humidity outside?
All you need is a humidity and temperature sensor, an Arduino board and an LCD screen to display the measured values.
This is where the project can get a little complicated. The temperature and humidity sensor will be placed outside your apartment or house, while the Arduino board with the display will be placed inside.
So you need to transmit the temperature and humidity information from the sensor to the Arduino board.
To do this, we propose two solutions:
The simplest: connect the temperature sensor to the Arduino board via a wire running through a small hole in the wall or window.
Harder: Transmit information from one arduino board to another by radio frequency, with a transmitter and receiver for example.
Then, with the buzzer, you can change the tone to make it lower-pitched if the gas leak is weak, and higher-pitched if the gas leak is stronger.
This is one of the easiest projects to carry out, as it doesn’t require the use of wifi, Bluetooth or radio waves.
With Arduino you can turn your manual garbage can into an automatic one!
No more pressing to lift the lid when your hands are full.
To do this, you’ll need two things: a distance sensor to detect your presence in front of the garbage can, and servomotors to lift the lid.
To program the Arduino board, once the distance sensor detects an object (you) closer than 50 cm to the garbage can, the servomotors attached to the lid of the garbage can will raise it so that you can dispose of your garbage.
Once the person is no longer in front of the garbage can, the distance sensor detects more objects, and this activates the servomotors to close the garbage can.
This is one of the simplest projects to implement compared with the others proposed above.
You don’t need to use 220V to control the components. You just need to connect the Arduino board to the mains.