like a lot of my peers, I use facebook and twitter a lot. They became a way of distracting myself and it makes me feel terrible when I waste that much time. I wanted to make something that would help me with that feeling so I came up with the idea of making something that makes this time useful.
Materials
What you need is:
-Arduino
-Some wires
-a knitting cord maker(The one I’m using is called Embellish cord maker and you can buy it here)
-Sufficient yarn
-DC motor(get it from Adafruit)
-power supply(get it from here)
-laptop
I had to try 4 different motors. hacking the cord maker was the second biggest challenge for me. I tried with this DC motor:
The gears didn’t work so I had to make the circle a square:
It wasn’t strong enough…
You need to create a small connector and put it in between the motor and the hole from the handle. One side of it should be a square(0.2in) and the other side should match your motor. I 3D printed the piece.
A chrome extension logs the current website in the browser to a .json file
Node.js then reads in the json file, checks the value, and if that information has a match on the list of time-wasting websites (facebook, etc.)… then node.js talks to the arduino using firmata (a node package) and sustains the output to trigger the motor. As long as the offending page is kept as the browser’s current page the only thing we need to decide is the frequency of how often the extension saves its current URL and how often does node.js check. Ideally there would be a way to eliminate the middleman!
There might be a way called browserify, but for now it looks like:
- Chrome extension writes current URL to json file (at interval yet to be determined)
- Node parses the json file and makes a decision(if website is on blocklist: run function… if not on blocklist, do nothing)
- The Arduino is activated and the knitting machine begins knitting
