This DIY Pressure Plate Turns On The Lights When You Walk Into A Room

This DIY Pressure Plate Turns On The Lights When You Walk Into A Room


Instructables user DIYHacksAndHowTos put together this simple pressure plate from cardboard and aluminium foil for a haunted house, but we’re intrigued by the home automation prospects. You could easily use it to turn lights or appliances on or off when you enter a room, or for anything else you want automated.

The video above does a great job of explaining in two minutes all of the different considerations involved — how you can connect the plate to an Arduino to run a program, how you can connect it to a relay to work with DC appliances like lights or other devices, or how you can set it to activate a sound module.

The latter is more specific to the haunted house idea, but using a pressure plate to run an Arduino program could be useful for a number of things, like opening the blinds, for example. Alternatively, setting it to toggle something plugged in to a DC relay could be great for turning on the lights in the garage as soon as you step through the door, without having to install a motion sensor, for example. The sky’s the limit, and the plate is remarkably easy to make.

Whether you’re exploring home automation projects, or you really are building a haunted house, it looks like a good project to try.

Use a DIY Pressure Plate Switch to Automate Your Haunted House [Instructables via Make]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

Here are the cheapest plans available for Australia’s most popular NBN speed tier.

At Lifehacker, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


Leave a Reply