Sure. I can post some more details (such as scripts and photo) when I get home if you're interested.
But at a high level, it's pretty straightforward, and there's also almost certainly far better ways of doing it.
The key components are
- a Philips Hue light
- The Openhab[1] open source home automation server (currently running on an old Windows box that's always on for various other reasons). This controls the lights.
- Apache, also running on the same box. This provides a very simple web UI for the Pi.
- A Raspberry Pi - it's one of the original Pi model Bs.
- Firefox (Iceweasel version) on the Pi - the built-in one didn't seem to run the jquery that I needed.
- A cheapo touchscreen [2] attached to the Pi.
The OpenHab server has a plugin for Hue lights, and you can write scripts to make it do various things, such as switch on/off at a particular time, or on getting a command from somewhere else. It also has a REST API interface.
It's this API interface that the web app is calling. That's made up at the moment of 3 buttons (on, off and dim), and when one is pressed it sends a jquery REST call to the OpenHab server to trigger one of the commands. Technically, what it's doing is setting one of 3 OpenHab "buttons" to ON. This triggers the OpenHab rule to change the light.
The touchscreen attaches straight onto the Pi's GPIO pins. I pointed Firefox at the Apache on my server and set it to full screen mode. The screen's not great - it feels as cheap as you'd expect for £16 - but it works, and most importantly my daughter loves it.
Like I say, there's almost certainly better/simpler ways to achieve some of this - I suspect I could run the entire thing on the Pi for example, or replace the Pi with an old iPhone that I've got lying around. The OpenHab software also allows you to build a custom UI itself. But I like playing, and there's a bunch of tech things that I wanted to try out, and this seemed like a fun and useful project to test them out on.
My next plan is to get an Arduino and connect some dials to it to allow direct control of brightness and RGB.
Great to have this data. But wouldn't the extent of dryer-induced shrinkage be driven by the amount of time in the dryer, as much or more than temperature?
While most modern dryers offer a choice of temperatures, the big knob mostly controls a humidistat-based target. I personally equate the "very dry" setting with "shrink beyond usability".
I'd expect that removing clothes while still damp would be more important to avoiding shrinkage than reducing the heat, but I'm no T-shirt scientist. (T-shirtician? T-shirtologist?)
"The biggest determinant of shrinkage is whether the shirt went in the dryer or not. (We wash and dry all t-shirts using a warm wash and normal/warm dry cycle)."
That doesn't answer the question, which is an interesting one. Where in the dry cycle does shrinkage occur? If you dry on hot to slightly damp, do you get the same level of shrinkage as cool to fully dry? If so, why haven't I ever seen a dryer that starts hot and transitions to cool as the clothes dry out?
If so, why haven't I ever seen a dryer that starts hot and transitions to cool as the clothes dry out?
I'm pretty sure that all of the three dryers we've had in the last twenty years had a permanent press setting that does exactly that. Our current one certainly does, and it's just the front-loader that was on sale at Home Depot, nothing fancy.
But they call it "permanent press" so those of us who didn't study domestic science don't know what it does ;)
Yeah, fair enough. Come to think of it, I don't even know why I know this. Our current dryer has something on the display that says something to that affect, but our previous ones were old school analog dials without explanatory text, yet I always knew that "permanent press" meant it starts out hot and ends cool so the clothes don't wrinkle.
Many cable set-top boxes have "Dolby Volume" as a feature in a hidden sub menu. It's off by default, as is the feature that prevents your TV from stretching 4:3 channels across your 16:9 screen.
So this 2008 post is timely for me; just last night I spotted that menu item, and wondered what it was.
