Smart Goose Deterrent System
Concept 2 Erg Hack
When I was a boy scout, I got the Energy Merit Badge. I will never forget a trip we took to see a house that was heated with a homemade solar heating system. It used tin cans, fans, and stones.
About 15 years ago I decided to build my own solar water heater. A solar panel and water storage tank were built from parts you could find at Home Depot: copper pipes, pex tubing, aluminum flashing, a rubber pond liner, insulation, wood, ... A controller was built with an Arduino, temperature sensors, a relay, and a fish tank pump. The controller pumps water through the solar panel when the temperature in the panel is warmer than the temperature in the storage tank.
Soon after the first programmable thermostats came out, I decided to build my own. First with an Arduino, then with a Raspberry Pi, and currently with an ESP32. My partner wanted to be able to turn on the heat with her smartphone before getting out of bed. Among the standard features you would expect in a smart thermostat, I also added a graph that shows indoor temperature, target temperature, and every time the furnace cycles on and off over a two day period. It gives you an idea of how well your house holds heat.
One of my favorite TV shows as a kid was The Six Million Dollar Man. It was about a man that had two legs, an arm, and an eye replaced with bionic implants. They gave him superhuman strength. It inspired me, in part, to become a biomedical engineer. At my first real job, I was fortunate to work for a lab that developed the first viable EMG controlled prosthetic arm. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment to build out our lab.
Over the years I have watched computers get smaller, more powerful, and cheaper. Recently, I felt compelled to build a bionic finger. I used a copper penny and an amplifier chip to create an electrode. I used an Arduino to capture and process EMG signals. The Arduino controls a servo attached to springs and pulleys that articulate a lego finger. All this was for less than $10 (a $5,999,990 savings)!
In 2023 I replaced a 40 year old central AC system in my home with a heat pump and several indoor air handlers. I found it much cheaper to do this work myself, even though I was eligible for huge rebates if I hired professionals. The heat pump brand that I chose wanted $200 per air handler to add wifi control capabilities. I built my own wifi controllers using ESP8266 microcontrollers and open source code. I was even able to figure out how to add voice control.