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Raimonster / Posts / Fridge-O-Mattic

Fridge-O-Mattic

4 minutes
May 30, 2020

Parts:

Story

Small hacky project where by installing an arduino with some very basic sensors, you can detect when the fridge’s door is left open.

Maybe you can relate, maybe not, but the fridge at my new place has some issues when closing the door, and sometimes it doesn’t close properly (you have to make sure every time it’s been properly closed, and not 99% closed)

is_door_opened?

By installing the ultrasonic distance sensor in the frame of the door, we can detect what’s the perceived distance by the sensor, and know if the sonar is hitting the door or not. If the sensor detects <10 cm, we say it’s hitting the door, so it beeps (or lights the leds, or makes your philips hue go crazy, your choice)…

Countdown

Once this phase was done, next thing was to bloat that thing somehow, and make it “do more”. So in between 10cm and 2mts, there’s a big range we could be using to mean different things, so it could have different “modes”, or smthing like this. We could indicate that distance with a magnet, aligned to the ultrasonic sensor.

The current behavior is that the measurements >10cm, the fridge-o-mattic sets a countdown of cm-10 minutes. The tricky part here is to know where a movement of the measurement is the door opening, is noise, or us, really setting the clock. The very crude way it is currently working is so that there’s a sameish comparison for everything, that rules out noise and random spurious measurements. To detect an intentional countdown setting we detect when the magnet moves (always >10cm, because <10 means “door”) for some time, and then it keeps steady. When it’s steady for 5 secs, we then set the countdown.

Once the countdown is set, we have a deadline when we know we’re going beep (or flash, or launch the missiles).

The ugly hacks come to set the whole thing without a button, or any extra feedback, because you know, after the alarm rang, you have to be very ‘tidy’ and clean the deadline variables and preset distances so that fridge-o-mattic doesn’t start a new countdown for the same distance as before, or a door detection messing everything up.

For now, it kinda works. But being C (since uni I haven’t written C I think), and being so PITA to update the code, I’m leaving this version like this (for a v0.1 anyway) while I wait for the nodemcu to arrive (Hey Lua!).

Development

As an extra, I got started with arduino programming and well, it was hard for me to get used to the IDE. First of all, it doesn’t properly work with ratpoison WM. Java applications used to have those strange issues. The way to solve it and make the window open correctly was to add the magic line exec wmname LG3D in my .ratpoisonrc. And install wmname on your system (thank God it is in the Nixos repo).

It was not trivial to know what to do with /dev/ttyUSB0 not being correctly accessed by my user. In the end it was easy, just add my user to the `dialout` group via users.users.rgrau.extraGroups.

Installing libraries was kind of a magic thing, using the IDE interface without knowing much where things lived, or which paths were used.

Monitoring the board using the serial port was ok, but finding out that I had to close the monitor window in order to upload a new version was a no-go.

Emacs enters the game. Now I was kinda confortable with the other stuff, I went back to check how the f I could use emacs for arduino programming. And there’s the arduino-mode, that did most of what I wanted, and although the monitor terminal is a bit crappy, I could hack it around to obvey me and I could finally reupload new code in a much faster way. you can install libs and compile everything from emacs, so great, another point for emacs.

All in all, a good experience with something that is really working in the real world. Let’s see what happens when I Get the nodemcus.

A lot of flags in the code show I don’t know what I’m doing. This looks like it should be an FSM, because that’s what those things are.

The link: https://github.com/kidd/fridge-o-mattic