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Step 6Upgrade #4: Wireless Control
Now comes the exciting part! It's probably not likely that you can leave your computer connected via USB to your arduino all day long in your kitchen. If you can that's great, but I need my laptop in my office where I find it useful. This is where my experience with the Tweet-a-Watt came in handy.
Early on I decided to use Xbee wireless devices to talk between my computer and the computer. Now I apparently did things the hard way because I thought you'd need to send the data through the Xbee controller from the arduino and then decode it on the other end with the Xbee Python library. This turns out to be completely untrue. You certainly can do it this way, but it's way harder than simply using the Xbee modules as a direct serial link to your computer.
It may have taken me hours, but this step shouldn't take you very long once you've set up your Xbees. Essentially you remove the USB cable between your computer and the arduino, hook up your Xbee modules (one to the computer via an FTDI cable and one to the arduino via tx/rx lines), and then continue as though you were still using the USB cable. Don't believe me? Try it. Maybe this was obvious to other people but it was pretty exciting when I figured it out.
Now I should tell you there are several steps to doing this whole wireless step. You need to first purchase and assemble the Xbee modules. Then you'll want to program each of the Xbee chips and finally connect them up. The best resource I found for setting up my modules was actually a tutorial about Wirelessly Programming your Arduino.
I decided to set up my arduino to be wirelessly programmed so that I could easily update the code from my laptop when I needed to upgrade my arduino. This was an added bonus to being able to wirelessly talk to my arduino via serial and it just seemed to sweeten the whole project. I also found this made some of the debugging easier since I needed to do a lot of writing and rewriting to the arduino.
Early on I decided to use Xbee wireless devices to talk between my computer and the computer. Now I apparently did things the hard way because I thought you'd need to send the data through the Xbee controller from the arduino and then decode it on the other end with the Xbee Python library. This turns out to be completely untrue. You certainly can do it this way, but it's way harder than simply using the Xbee modules as a direct serial link to your computer.
It may have taken me hours, but this step shouldn't take you very long once you've set up your Xbees. Essentially you remove the USB cable between your computer and the arduino, hook up your Xbee modules (one to the computer via an FTDI cable and one to the arduino via tx/rx lines), and then continue as though you were still using the USB cable. Don't believe me? Try it. Maybe this was obvious to other people but it was pretty exciting when I figured it out.
Now I should tell you there are several steps to doing this whole wireless step. You need to first purchase and assemble the Xbee modules. Then you'll want to program each of the Xbee chips and finally connect them up. The best resource I found for setting up my modules was actually a tutorial about Wirelessly Programming your Arduino.
I decided to set up my arduino to be wirelessly programmed so that I could easily update the code from my laptop when I needed to upgrade my arduino. This was an added bonus to being able to wirelessly talk to my arduino via serial and it just seemed to sweeten the whole project. I also found this made some of the debugging easier since I needed to do a lot of writing and rewriting to the arduino.
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I would like to figure out a way to take the output (light/sound) and wire in a relay to control say 120VAC to ring a louder bell or flash more lights or set off an X-10 code (their remote sensors don't work at the range the HFT unit does).
I belong to a Google Group on Woodworking that's pretty good but have not found a similar discussion group where one might post such queries and get something other than SPAM and offers of free sex.
If you can help . . .
Thanks
A much easier and potentially safer route is to wire an AC or X10 remote control or other remote control. There are a lot of tutorials for using a micro to control a remote control (the book Practical Arduino has one example, but search the web). Basically you would use a pin from the arduino to electrically simulate a button push (bridge the switch) on the remote. This is a very good beginner-intermediate project.