Welcome to my little place on the web. I am Martijn van der Horst.
Category: Projects
I like to do some hobby projects related to software or electronics. This category contains all posts that relate to such a project.
For this year’s secret santa I had to find a present for a friend of mine who plays the drums. So I decided to make him a drum and put the present in there. I wanted to try and make a drum that could actually be played.
How much electricity are we using? A colleague of mine has made a simple circuit attached to an Arduino to answer that question. Furthermore my parents were also interested in monitoring their electricity usage. So I decided to introduce my father into the world of Arduino for his birthday.
For the new bathroom in my home I also installed a Velux window, complete with an electric roller shutter. Of course I wanted to connect this shutter to the rest of my home automation system. Velux has options for this, but I wasn’t looking forward to integrating a vendor specific system to my existing setup. I already had Z-wave installed so I made a small project to connect the Velux shutter to a Düwi Z-wave module.
The reverse geo-caching puzzle box got me and a colleague talking about puzzle boxes, and making our own. As a first attempt I wanted to make a purely mechanical one. Such a puzzle box could not suffer from an empty battery. Also, I wanted to make it open with a magnet, to make it seem a bit more like a magic box 🙂
Everybody knows you should make a good backup, but how many people actually do it? An old colleague of mine wanted to reinstall Windows on his computer and thought his family photos to be safe on the system’s second hard drive. However, during the reinstall (which included formatting) there was a mix-up of the IDE and SATA drive and their partitions. When he rebooted his computer the photos were gone, replaced by a clean partition containing only the Windows OS.
My family has an annual reunion where a lot of games are played, many of them revolving around their favorite sport: soccer. Some twenty years ago my father came up with the question of whether we could measure the speed of a soccer ball. That way we would have a new game in which the family members could see who has the strongest kick. Since then this project has seen several incarnations.
To determine who goes first in answering a question during a quiz a quiz table is used; the player that presses the button first gets to go first. That’s pretty simple, but we would also like to know the order in which the players pressed their buttons, in case the first player gives the wrong answer. Furthermore, we would like to get rid of all the cables, so that nobody can trip over them and the players can be seated at any convenient location.