Taste the metal

About a month and a bit ago I started watching videos of people metal detecting on Youtube. It looked so fun that in a fit of wild optimism I burned up some of my savings and bought a Garrett Ace 250 and a Garrett Pin pointer. After shopping around it was clear that ordering one domestically was bad idea as the local distributor seems to be a con man. Screw him. I got mine from the States. Detector, Pin pointer and shipping from the US was less than what the detector alone would have cost from the local.

After some shenanigans with USPS, they sent my package all the way to Canada, I finally got my hands on my new toy. I had to wait a few days till I had a day off to play with it properly. That day was today, so I woke at the crack of dawn, went back to sleep and got up at the more reasonable hour of 0800. My plan had been to head down really early before the sun was up to avoid the awkward stares that you get when wandering the beach digging small holes.

I spent a couple of hours searching Bathers Beach in Perth and found plenty of crappy aluminium junk and a couple of coins.

Sweet sweet treasure

An aussie 5c piece and a Malaysian 20 sen piece. The sen is hard to see as it's fairly corroded. They are made of Cupronickel which is supposed to be highly resistant to erosion in sea water. I guess that myth is busted.

This is what they are supposed to look like

While the whole adventure was definitely not profitable, it was a lot of fun. I think next time I will actually drag myself out of bed early and head up to some of the wealthier beaches and see what I can find. I'm hoping for tonnes of gold but will be happy with a few coins. The only thing I have to sort out now is all the district council red tape and hoop jumping to figure out whether I am a horrible criminal for wanting to do a bit of detecting on the beach. As with all government and corporate bodies a straight answer is definitely not on the cards. As the old saying goes "None of us is a dumb as all of us".

My first project

So basically I'm a nerd with a whole bunch of undeveloped interests, electronics, programming, digital art, photography, astronomy, bull riding and moon walking. Well maybe not the last two. What I need is a project that will motivate me to actually start learning the deeper parts of some of these interests.

To that end I have come up with an idea hat will allow me to at least cover some of the electronicy parts.


My flat has a Daikin heat pump, and for no reason at all I thought it would be cool to build a web based remote control for it so that I can control it via a web page on my phone and also get some basic info about the room, temp, light levels and random things like that. It will be a micro controller hooked up to a router and communicates with the heat pump via IR.

The first thing I'm going to have to do is figure out how to build and IR receiver so that I can begin to reverse engineer the IR protocol that the remote uses. I'm assuming that it uses a 38khz carrier wave with manchester encoding as every other website about IR signal decoding says this is what they use. I hope the assumption is correct as I've ordered that parts accordingly.

I will be prototyping everything on the Arduino as it's easy to use and I can be very lazy as a lot of other people have been very hard at work writing libs and schematics for me to leech off of. Eventually I want to run it all using a PIC but all in good time. Hopefully more pictures to come.

Things I need to learn/do:

• Learn to decode IR
• Map Daikin remote protocol
• Learn how to make an IR transmitter
• Transmit working IR codes
• Learn how to connect an Arduino to the intertubes
• Learn php or java or whatever and make a website for the arduino to connect to
• Learn how to optimise a website for cell phones

Piece of cake right?