[Cialug] Pressing a button remotely

[Nathan C. Smith]

Yes doing it yourself is part of the fun.  And Parallel printer ports are harder to find these days (no, I don't want your old Pentium)

Let me narrow the focus and describe the specific scenario a little further. 

A lazy man had to drive to a location (twice in a week) to open a garage door to receive a shipment.  I, er, the lazy man that is, already had video surveillance of that location.  So all the lazy man really would have needed to do was open the garage door remotely and watch to make sure the shipment was delivered and the door was closed (or do it himself) when the delivery people left. 

It is a standard two wire SPST momentary contact style garage-set up. 

-Nate

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org 
> [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On Behalf Of Lathrop Preston
> Sent: Wednesday, January 28, 2009 3:15 PM
> To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
> Subject: Re: [Cialug] Pressing a button remotely
> 
> but part of the fun is rigging something like this up... instead of
> just buying off the shelf...
> 
> I would probably go with a usb interface board of some sort feeding to
> whatever I could design... there are many options you could do
> 
> On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 3:03 PM, Nathan Stien 
> <nathanism at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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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