What is it?

Bare PCB for soldering of home presence simulator. The design is based on the cheap but powerful Atmel microcontroller Attiny84. It senses the light intensity and if it becomes lower then programmed threshold it starts to toggle 4 channels of LED's (four colors : RED,GREEN,BLUE and white) with different intensity and different time periods. The resulting light effect is similar to that of working in the room TV set.

Why did you make it?

The winter is coming, the days become shorter and shorter.... This time of the year is graceful for the burglars. The peoples are still at work, but the criminals can do their dark doings unmolested and to strike at late afternoon times. There are lot of different methods to protect your home - alarms, dogs..etc. They all can scary the burglars, but they are not always effective. There is another method, which could prevent unsolicited visits - you can try to cheat them, that you are at home. For that purpose a home presence simulators could be used - they are devices, which can switch on lights, music or TV sets automatically or remotely controlled and to try to convince the burglars that there is someone at home. The presented here apparatus is such device.

What makes it special?

This device consumes few watts of electricity, what compared to the consumption of standard TV can be hundred times smaller, but making the same visual effect looking from outside the room. The device uses very cheap microcontroller and the total costs can be lower than 10USD, but it can prevent money and jewelry lost for thousands.

The full information about the project can be found here: Instructables