So for the second year in a row, I spent the first half of March in Portland, Oregon, USA, for EmberConf. The PN gang and I met Jeff Eiden of Spark, who gifted me with a Spark Core dev kit.
This little device is super cool. It takes 5VDC from a USB, and gives you both analog and digital in/out. It’s like an Arduino, but wi-fi connected, cloud-manageable, and API-interactable. All in this tiny little package… did I mention that you configure it without ever connecting anything USB except for power? Even on a WPA-passworded wifi network?
So the first thing I did (over lunch at EmberConf) was to make der blinkenlights: syncing the Core with the network, claiming it with the cloud web admin tools, and writing and uploading a program ALL WITHOUT EVER TOUCHING THE CORE. Seriously, this is cool. Painfully cool.
Anyway, it sat for the past few weeks until I thought of a project to do with it.
Lockify
I’ve had a Morning Industry deadbolt on one of my doors for a while now. It’s great when I rent my place on Airbnb, because I can have a guest choose a code before they come and they won’t need a key.
Last weekend I was doing a spring cleaning and I found an old RF remote that I bought with the lock: one of these little guys that looks like a keychain garage remote:
It can be paired with the deadbolt to lock and unlock it from the remote. That’s not useful to me, so I figured I could h4x0r this remote, connect it to a Spark Core, and use it to lock and unlock the door from a computer, phone, or tablet. Yep!
My friend and fellow Hacklabber Alex is a far more accomplished home automation hacker than I am. He has similar locks and can control them over Insteon. He uses a Morning Industry device that does the same thing I wanted to do. (I admire a company who will release a product that is basically a total hack.) Alex let me pop off the cover on the remote to figure out which switch connections did what:
… so I soldered the same number of wires to the same places on my own remote, choosing different colours so it would be easier to follow:
Then I came home and quickly figured out that I didn’t need all of those wires. (I didn’t need the green or the blue wire: turns out they were there because Morning’s solution to controlling two buttons was to have each button connected to its own Insteon bridge.) To power the remote, I needed to connect red to a +5VDC source and black to ground. If I supply current to the orange and yellow wires (even the 3.3V out on the spark’s digital pins is fine), it’s like pressing the button on the remote.
Since I wanted to do this on a prototyping board and not have lots of wires, I stopped by Creatron, our local nerdshop, and grabbed a both USB port and a barrel connector that I could use to power it. (I have them both on the board in the photo, but I’m only using the USB now because that’s the cable I have handy.)
How to do it
So now I have everything I need:
- Spark Core
- Prototyping board
- Prototyping-mountable USB port (or barrel connector; your choice, but not both if you wire it up the way I have!)
- Morning Industry RF remote with wires soldered as pictured above (green/blue unnecessary)
- Wire for patching
What I did:
- Place the Spark in the centre of the bread board so all of its pins are in one of the center rows.
- Get power to the board, Option A: Place the barrel connector into the side rails for + and – power (taking care to match up the + and – on the board and on the connector).
- Get Power to the board, Option B: place the USB port into four of the centre rows that are NOT shared with the Spark Core. Connect a short red wire from the USB pin labelled VBUS (or +5V or something) to the + row in the power rail, and a short black wire from the USB pin labelled GND to the – row in the power rail. (Or if you have a USB connector that lets you connect directly to the +/- power rails, do that.)
- Connect the red wire from the remote into the + power rail.
- Connect the black wire from the remote into the – power rail.
- Connect the VIN port on the Spark Core to the + power rail with a red wire.
- Connect the GND port on the Spark Core to the – power rail with a red wire.
- Connect the orange wire from the remote to port D2 on the Core.
- Connect the yellow wire from the remote to port D3 on the Core.
- Double-check your connections. Here’s my picture again. I think the colours should make it clear. Remember, you only need the USB port OR the barrel connector, not both.
Then I uploaded this code to the Core, powered it all on, and it worked! Here is the dashboard I wrote using Dashing, a nice little Sinatra/batman.js Ruby/Javascript dashboard framework from Shopify. [Github repo for Roombot, my dashboard.] With it, I can receive click/touch events and can lock and unlock the door from anywhere within wifi range. (The other cards in the bottom row are TTC arrival times, and the image off the screen is one of my security cams.)
All in all, a fun, fast little project.
I really like this little Core. A remotely-manageable, wifi-connected computer with digital and analog in/out pins? For that price… wow. I see more projects (and more Cores) in my future.