[Cialug] Pressing a button remotely

[Nathan Stien]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Nathan C. Smith <nathan.smith at ipmvs.com>wrote:

>
> If you wanted to open your garage door or turn something on or off from a
> remote location what would you use to do it?


In the past I have used a relay driven by a pin from a printer port.  It's
not pretty, but if you have an old machine with a printer port, it's one of
the easiest devices to interface to.  You'll get +5V or 0V relative to case
ground depending on the bit status.  Beware, though: it's not much current,
but it can drive a small relay fine.  And your relay will need a current
limit resistor, so you'll have to look at your current requirements and bust
out some Ohm's law.  Then you write a script to flip that bit, and ssh in to
call it.

I would probably wire it to a standard wireless remote control for the
garage door, as I wouldn't want to run an entire computer in my garage
(+wifi) just for this.

I had this type of ghetto-rig back in high school on an ancient OpenBSD 486,
and it worked for several years.  It is very low on money-cost but higher on
time-cost -- a compromise which makes sense for a teenager, but possibly not
for a working adult.  Now that I have money instead of time, I would
probably look for a bluetooth/wifi/usb-operated power strip or something
like that.

- Nathan
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