HAL 9000 Garage Door Button Upgrade
Introduction: HAL 9000 Garage Door Button Upgrade
Inspiration can hit you at the most unexpected time. Over Spring Break my family and I went to NASA's Johnson's Space Center in Houston. They had an exhibit called "Popnology" which featured different forms of science fiction technology that has appeared in pop culture and how it has influenced/inspired our current technology and vice versa. It was a great display of sci-fi props and interactive activities. However, there was one display that caught my eye, it was the Artificial Intelligence exhibit that referenced HAL 9000 from the 1968 <PERSON> film "2001: A Space Odyssey". The blue light emitting all around the console and the ominous glowering red eye in the center of the HAL 9000 unit captured my attention and intrigue. The wonderful lighting of the display begged me to take its pictures. I snapped a few shots on my phone and went on to enjoy the rest of my day at NASA.
After several hours of exploring NASA's offerings, we make the drive home and pull into our garage. And what do I notice as I go to push the button that closes my garage door? I see a familiar red glow just behind the frosted plastic of the button. It was at that exact moment that I knew I was going to replace my garage door button with a HAL 9000.
At first, I thought it would be amazing if I could figure out a way to convert my garage door opener to be voice activated. While you can do this, sort of, ultimately you are just using an Amazon Alexa or a Google Home assistant. And they would be using their own voices which I did not want. 47
I wanted to be able to say, "HAL open the pod bay doors" and it would respond with the classic line from the movie, "I'm sorry <PERSON> I am afraid I can't do that." and then eventually it would open the garage door. After a ton of research, I found that it would not be possible to make it open my garage door with voice commands. So, I had to settle for HAL replacing my garage door button instead.
I was going to use Tinkercad to design HAL but I was lucky and found that CONCENTRIX had already made a 3D model and posted it on Thingiverse HAL 9000 Prop Replica by CONCENTRIX - Thingiverse . I used his model and a model of the speaker grill designed by <PERSON> HAL 9000 speaker grille by mabbog - Thingiverse for the majority of my project.
With most of the design work done I got to work on the rest of the project.
Supplies
Garage Door Button
Screw Drivers
Soldering Iron
Solder
Wire Cutters
Thin Gauge Wiring - (Sorry I don't have the exact gauge wire I used)
Heat Shrink Tubing
Acetone
Paint Brush
Dremel with Cut-off Wheel
Various Grits Sandpaper 150 up to 400 grit
3d Printer
Super Glue
Baking Soda
Fake Security Cameras
Filler Primer
Satin Black Spray Paint
Gloss Black Spray Paint
Matte Clear Spray Paint
Scrap piece of Flat stock at least 5 inches wide
Red Scrubbing Pad
Rub-n-Buff Silver
Disposable Brush
5 Minute Epoxy
1/8 inch MDF
Drill
Drill bits 5/16
Disposable Gloves
Respirator
Safety Glasses
Step 1:
The first thing I did was to verify that the current garage door button actually had a red LED bulb. I removed the two screws that secured the button to the wall plate then backed off the screws that held the wires in place and removed the two wires. That freed up the assembly which gave me access to the PCB board which I pried off the plastic housing. So far so good there was a button and a red LED light.
*This took several days to complete so I had to install a separate garage door button while I worked on this so that we could still use our garage door. This is not entirely necessary though; you can always just use the garage door remote control opener from your car. But that means the wires will be hanging out of the box in the meantime. I wasn't sure this was even going to work so I just installed another button.
Step 2:
Because the current spacing of the button and LED was not going to work. The LED has to fit inside a hole in the center of HAL and would have to be removed and then extended with some wiring. In order to do this, I had to remove the solder that held the LED in place. But before I did that I used a marker to mark the positive side of the LED because once it was removed I would not be able to tell which side was positive and which was negative. 582