"ding" circuit

What's the cheapest PIR available out there?

I'd like to stick one on the top of the new AirWick automatic air freshener, should keep the cat away from "certain places", don't want to go into details :)

SioL

My old GE under-cabinet microwave was so loud I had to open it up and tone down the piezo screamer. I used a piece of kitchen sponge and a clothespin. BEEP BEEP BEEP became mmph mmph mmph. Most satisfying.

It finally blew up a few weeks ago, and I got a genuine RadarRange (tm) to replace it (Amana bought the name from Raytheon.) The old GE was so heavy and in such a bad location (right above a glass cook surface) I took it apart on the wall, removing the heavy bits one at a time, before I took the shell down. What a nuisance. Some of the new Japanese microwaves use hf dc/dc converters instead of 60 Hz magnetics, but the Amana is still a brick.

My job is to cone-drip a pot of Peet's every morning, boiling water from a kettle, hand-poured. Hint for the day: if you drop a toothpick into the cone before you put the filter in, it will drip faster.

John

:)

SioL,

Here's a clip from a comp.robotics.misc thread earlier this month:

Please feel free to add to it. Note that these are low-level items, e.g. pyro sensors and pyro+lens. You can pick up PIR wall switches from (e.g.) Home Depot and Lowes, among other sources.

Hope this helps. If you come up with something interesting, please post back.

Frank McKenney, McKenney Associates Richmond, Virginia / (804) 320-4887 Munged E-mail: frank uscore mckenney ayut minds pring dawt cahm (y'all)

-- Computers, like leftovers, make you feel smart TWICE: Once, when you carefully select all the best equipment and components, and again when you manage to get SOMETHING working despite the fact that none of the new stuff does what you thought it would. -- Dr. E.A. McKenney

--

It would be surprise to anyone who pushed the button, wouldn't it? :)

Still can't find a date?

-- Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to prove it. Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell Central Florida

Wouldn't it be easier for Win to finish his time machine and go into the future for a copy, than put up with all the jokes? ;-)

Thanks!

Btw, I've found complete cat repellent devices with a motion detector, but they're ridiculously expensive, especially considering you usually need a few for typical problem areas.

SioL

I dunno - a "blup" might sound like a drip! =:-O

Good Luck! Rich

One year, they gave us all clocks with the company name on them that included the alarm function. Over the next week, the boss found them in (when the alarm went off) in his drawer, in a cabinent, under a pile of papers, under his desk next to the wall, and finally, in the overhead above the ceiling tiles (three of them, set to different times... 8-) )

Charlie

sample

plays

Especially if (for Halloween) it made the sound of those huge knockers in "Young Frankenstein". ("Ooh! Thank you, Doctor!") :-)

Cheers! Rich

OK, I've got one.

You have an envelope with a gradual attack, maybe 1 sec., and the signal would start out as white noise, and slowly change to pink both during the one sec. attack, and through about another second or two of sustain, turning "pinker" and "pinker", until it's almost "brown" (imagine a 1 oz cup at a full boil), and there's a "click" (either 5 cycles of 1 KHz or 6 cycles of 1.2 KHz) and the amplitude decays while the spectrum continues to get "browner".

I have no idea how accurate my terms are, but I'm sure you can see what I'm saying here. Or hear it. It's the sound my Sumbeam Hot-Shot or whatever it was made when I'd put a cup of water in it, hit the "go" switch, and it'd bring it to boiling and turn itself off.

Of course, you'd synthesize this to play at the end of your actual heater's cycle - clearly, you want to snooze for more than three or four seconds! :-)

Cheers! Rich

from a DIP8 serial EEPROM and feeding it into a DIP8

Overkill. Just an eprom with 4060 plus on/off tranny. Maybe additional 4040, if you run out of addresses. I've got one wired to my doorbell, battery operated and working pretty well (battery replacement every 2 years). Should have some factory made PCB boards left, too. Top address serves as melody selection, there can be two. Any takers? I published it in a local electronics paper way back, but never sold entire stock, its out for grabs.

I've also got boing.wav, tarzan.wav and several other similar files somewhere (hope they're not on a 3.5 floppy - probably unreadable), ready to be burned into eprom.

SioL

I had a couple hundred cards with dead coin cells. I thought about soldering a foot of wire and a 1N34 diode to each of them, then scattering them all over at a 5 KW AM radio station's transmitter site. :-)

Now *there* is an evil idea: Maybe one could charge a capacitor just enough to let the thing run occasionally for a just few minutes on the output from local radio stations. *That* would drive the victim nuts because the musik will never entirely stop and it does not run enough to be easily located. Hmm....

They finally paid their back consulting bills so I didn't do it, but I did keep them in the warehouse for about three years, "Just in case" it happened again.