Project For Students: DIY Doorbell Will Send Pictures Of Your Guests To Your iPhone

Use an Arduino and an optional IP camera to build a doorbell that sends you a Push notification on your phone and an email with a picture of the person at the door.This project will help you to hack your doorbell to send Push notification and an email with an attached picture when somebody's at the door. It use the free PushingBox service to delegate all the programming part and make things easy.

Step 1 — Notifying Doorbell with PushingBox 

• How does it work ?
  • 1. When the doorbell is pushed, the Arduino sends an HTTP request to the PushingBox API.
  • 2. PushingBox launches the user's scenario and gets a picture from the web camera.
  • 3. PushingBox sends a Push notification to the user's phone and a mail message with the picture attached.

Step 2 

• Prepare your material. You need:
  • An Arduino + Ethernet Shield
  • A Doorbell
  • A soldering iron
  • A 10K resistor
  • A web camera (optional)

Step 3 

• Open your doorbell.
• Solder wires to the button's terminals.
• Close the doorbell.

Step 4 

• Plug the wires into the Arduino.
  • One wire on the 5v pin;
  • One wire on the 3rd input pin;
  • The 10K resistor between GND and the 3rd pin.

Step 5 

• Test the connectivity with a simple Arduino program.

Step 6 

• The hardware part is finished. Let's define the way you will be notified.
• Go to http://www.pushingbox.com.
  • Login with your Google account.
  • Go to the My Services page.
  • Click on Add a service.

Step 7 

• Click on the service by which you want be notified.
  • Use Prowl or Pushme.to for iPhone Push notification;
  • Notifry for Android Push notification;
  • Toasty for Windows Phone Push notification.
• Enter the name of your new service and fill in the API that this application gave you when you installed it.
• Click Submit.

Step 8 

• Now, go to the My Scenarios page.
• Create a scenario called "Somebody's at the door".
• Click on Create scenario.
• Click on Add an Action.
  
  
  

  

  

  

  
  Step 9 

  • First, add an action using the Email Service.
  • Fill in the mail Subject and the Body.
  • The third field is optional and is for attaching a shot from your IP camera to the email. Fill in the URL (publicly reachable) of your web camera. The camera's output must be a picture less than 100KB in size.
  • Do the same with your Push notification service and click the Back button.
  

  
  

  Step 10 

  • Your scenario is now created.
  • Click on "Test" to test the scenario.
  • You should receive a Push notification on your phone and an email.
  • Make a note of the "DeviceID" value of this scenario. You will paste it into the Arduino code.
  

  
  Step 11 

  • Download the Arduino source code from the PushingBox API page and open it.
  • In the #define DEVID1 line, paste the DeviceID of your scenario. Make sure you enclose it in quotes as shown.
  • Compile the code and program your Arduino.
  • You're done! Test it, install it on your door and enjoy! :)
  
  
  
  

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Zombie Apocalypse, the Board Game

Game Night of the Living Dead

The project started as a creative outlet. Gracia’s college band broke up and a weekly game night filled in. But being a restless maker, he soon grew tired of playing other people’s games and decided to create one himself. Starting with a rough idea and “zombie apocalypse” as the theme, he began experimenting.

His first prototypes were crude black-and-white printouts and gameplay was a disaster, “Everyone died in a few minutes” admitted Gracia.

Unfazed, he redesigned the rules. The next session had a smaller body count. He partnered with a web designer named Zack Parks, whom he met on a message board, and the game improved steadily. With a little prodding from friends, the pair set out to bring the game to market and christened their company GreenBrier games.

Gracia and  Parks had a rule set and general design, but games live or die on artwork. In order to be successful they needed to find a hungry designer in search of an opportunity. They turned to Deviant Art, the web’s largest and most active community for illustrators. They advertised for an unpaid illustrator with a predilection for zombies and received over 50 applicants.

The pair held a “design-off”, with the only prize being more unpaid work, goth glory, and a share of future revenues. Illustrator Ricky Casdorph won the challenge, joined the team, and started spawning blood-spattered characters at a furious pace.

Custom design software allowed the team to rapidly develop content. Photo: GreenBrier Games

Zombie Photoshop

As the team grew, so did the stakes. Gracia and Parks leveraged their expertise as software engineers to create a custom design program (think Zombie Photoshop) that allowed the geographically distributed team to iterate rapidly. If a prototype did poorly in a test, they could easily redesign. These new tools allowed the game design to evolve more quickly and it soon developed the patina of a commercial product.

GreenBrier Games invested in rapid prototyping tools to produce high quality samples.

The team decided to test the game at few popular conventions, but knew that printouts would look lame, so they and invested in steel-ruled dies — tools that look like cookie cutters — that cut through chipboard, to prototype the game pieces. Using those tools, they produced polished samples that looked like manufactured products.

Convention attendees played for hours. Many asked how much it would cost to take the prototypes home, a testament to the quality of the team’s production values.

Play testing Zpocalypse at a game convention

With enthusiastic responses from gamers, Gracia started contacting factories that could mass-produce Zpocalypse. But goaded by the founders’ wide-eyed excitement, the game design had ballooned to include hundreds of cards, dozens of tiles, and scores of miniature figures, all resulting in an impossibly high quote from manufacturers. “You’re crazy to have this much content” was the blunt message relayed by a game-industry adviser.

The Zpocalypse team quickly reduced the scope of the game by 80 percent, making their manufacturing estimates much more manageable.

Dawn of the Designer

Aspiring game designers used to have to wait to take their game to the annual Toy Fair in New York City and pray that Mattel or Hasbro would decide to distribute it. Today, Kickstarter is the kingmaker.

Green Brier Games set out to raise $15,000, but the excellent design, loyal community who had already played the game in development, and a tweet from nerd queen Felicia Day, rocketed Zpocalypse into the record books. The game is now scheduled for release this Halloween.

Kickstarter has a graveyard of games that didn’t succeed. What set Zpocalypse apart? Design wasn’t the only factor, but it was a critical one. If you’re thinking of bringing a product to market, don’t be a brainless zombie; add a designer to your team if you hope to survive.

All photos courtesy of GreenBrier Games

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