

Show HN: Text Message turns on blender - Madhav_
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=226kdTCxLsA
Turning on the blender is obviously insignificant, but we did this as a proof of concept. Right now I'm getting it to work to unlock my door (I just have to machine the clamp). I've cut it down so it's one line of code started with an incron script. I can share it if there's any interest.
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dkersten
That looks very complicated compared to what it needed to be. Can't find the
link now, but there was a guy on hackaday or somesuch who connected the
vibration alert to his car to start/unlock (don't remember which) it. So, get
an old, cheap phone, take out vibration motor, connect to blender on/off
toggle, then simply ring the phone and the blender starts. Its free too,
because the call never has to go through.

Of course, doing it by sms the way this guy did means you can send it more
complex commands.

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Madhav_
That's pretty sick.

This is actually much simpler than it seems. It's just a microcontroller
hooked up to the switch (just two wires). The version shown in the video
costed much more than it needed to only because we didn't know what we were
doing at the time. The whole package can be done wirelessly for ~$35. The
benefit of this method is the expandability factor. It can be hooked up to
almost anything.

The text message backbone is just a postfix mail server running incron which
starts a bash script to parse the message.

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dkersten
Yes, thats what I was thinking when I wrote the final sentence. The vibration
method is simpler - but this way has many more uses and can be expanded. Great
work either way!

