You need to be exact about what you mean by controlling it.
You could certainly use an arduino to replace the manual controls.

uniquely identify someone walking (or jogging) by

Take a step back and try to be very clear and precise about what you want to do.
When I read the sentence above I think you want to tell if Jane ran past as opposed to John.
Is that really true or do you just want to know that somebody ran past?

RFID is only going to work if people carry tags.
You them seem to branch out into image recognition and an arduino is not going to do that.

An arduino will tell you if something has come close to your sensor but you are right it might be a deer not a person.

You might get more responses if you wrote your question in english.

If I understood your question the answer is that you are correct - it is not possible.

What might be possible is to use an arduino to build a WiFi signal strength detector.
You would then move the detector around to detect the strength in various locations.

Of course most laptops etc. already display signal strength so you could just use that.

A much larger asteroid trundled past between the Earth and the geostationary satellites on the same day. Was that complete coincidence or did they come from the same direction?

Apparently there is a fairly large one that currently has a 1% chance of a hit in 2048.

The odds of a hit in a populated area are low, but I doubt NASA can give strike positions accurate enough to be really meaningful.
Apart from the difficulty of accurately calculating trajectory once the thing enters the atmosphere surely there must be a large random factor ?

Maybe they could say an asteroid will hit the East coast of USA and the blast might be 2M tonnes, but is that helpful?

It seems there may be loads of entire planets cannon balling through space but again the chances of getting hit are slim.

rats would eat the leather which was lubricated with animal fat if I remember well

you remember Brunel's atmospheric railway Boffin1 

I thought they used beeswax which did sound impractical and doing a search just now I have seen mention of Cod oil. However rats do seem to have been the downfall.

In more recent times I have seen a description of a tunnel supposed to be in Holland which you cycle into and a large fan blows you along at quite high speed. Not as green as simple cycling but dry, safer than the road, and perhaps a relatively efficient way of moving people about?

It is very clever. They also seem to have figured out how to get the same perspex block to display several different images depending on the angle the light hits it from.

One application seems to be for use in buildings. The milling really is very light so apparently a block would look like a window, with little obvious distortion, but it can project images.

I think they were going to mill glass - I did not know you could do that.

Also interesting that the ancient Chinese had managed something similar without the befit of computers.

As I recall I was rather disappointed in the 'crash' as it seemed to be more like a high speed landing gone bad rather then a near vertical crash I was hoping for.

They wanted a survivable but fairly violent crash so that they could get information from crash dummies etc.
In the end the crash they produced would have killed 25% of the people so they probably got it right.

It seems the undercarriages on the wings are designed to shear off to avoid damaging the wing fuel tanks and they behaved as planned. The undercarriage under the cockpit was not designed to shear off but it did look as if it was then responsible for ripping the cockpit right off the plane. The crew and first class were totaled.

The passengers at the front of the plane got hit by 12g, at the rear it was 6g.

Brace position won over sitting upright, though I thought the upright dummy was a bit unlucky.
One thing that I found interesting was that the brace position did not appear to threaten peoples necks as you might think, but made them more likely to break their legs. Because the braced person is leaning over their legs the legs are not free to move up and so undergo a lot of stress and slide back under the seat.

Great that you can fly a 727 with an RF controller even if only for a few miles.

Yes, the chase plane had to stay within 50m of the 727 which was a bit of a problem because the top speed of the chase plane was close to the stall speed of the 727.

Amazingly you can buy a working 727 for $300k, I thought it would be a lot more.

The program is a bit of a tease because you have to watch a while to see the crash, but it was interesting.

I would go for the "or anything option".

My first option would be to simply talk to the company you used to pay and ask how the system operates, what number it calls and how to disable it. They presumably get the calls and ignore them because you don't have a contact any more so they may be helpful.

Second option would be to set it off several times quite quickly at a known date and time and then look at the telephone bill.

You have said the system is using an autodialer which is why I am thinking in terms of a serial line, a modem and a telephone.
If neither of the above work and you have a PC with a RS232 serial port you can probably tap into the line between the security system to display what the system is sending to the modem.

If on the other hand you actually have a networked system, so there is no autodialing involved, you might use something like Wireshark to capture and decode the communications.

I know that a number of people are interested in arduino controlled milling machines, so I thought I would post this.


It appears that milling machines can be used to carve perspex blocks that display images when light is shone through them.
The light used is just ordinary sunlight or torch light, no lasers needed. The strange thing is that the images displayed are of high resolution yet the milling is quite crude. Furthermore the milling on the block can hardly be seen and certainly does not resemble the displayed image.

There are some clever mathematics involved in calculating how to mill the blocks to display the images, but the people involved don't seem to fully understand how such high resolution images can result.

A long lost Chinese technique that does something similar. Shining light on a polished metal coin displays the image carved on the reverse of the coin.

They cut through the floor of the passenger compartment and attached servios to the physical control cables running to the plane's control surfaces and engines.

Using an off-the-shelf rf controller for model planes they were then able to control the pitch, banking and thrust of a real Boeing 727.
The aircraft took off with crew onboard. Six people then bailed out using three parachutes.

The pilot and a photographer remained. After switching the aircraft to remote control they also bailed out. It has to be said they did not hang about after switching to remote.

After that the plane was flown for five miles using the rf controller to an intended deliberate crash.

I am happy for others to correct me on this, but basically there is a very big overlap between the application of servos and stepper motors and you could use either. In your particular case a servo may be better as I would expect it to generate less heat and, since it is not stepping, to have less vibration.

In general servos only operate through 180 degrees, but that probably meets your needs. One thing I am not sure about is speed, the larger the move you are trying to make the faster the servo will try to go. You could move the servo in small increments, but that might bring back the possibility of vibration.

You have a lax training environment. If the student doesn't verbalize the flow rate,
fail them on the session.

I favour zoomkat's approach, you could still measure the valve setting though.
That would allow you to deduct points if they failed to verbalize and fail them if
they get the setting wrong (even if they did verbalize the correct value).

I hate written rules and procedures for two reasons;

• People forget them
• New people may not be aware of the correct procedure

If key actions are always verbalized then if a person forgets to do something others are much more likely to notice. Also new people immediately become aware that something is being done and so automatically learn to do it.

[but won't verbalize the flow rate they've set it at]

If you put anything in the flow then you run the risk that when it fails it causes an obstruction.

students will put oxygen on a patient or mannequin but won't verbalize the flow rate they've set it at.

Your problem does not seem to be measuring the flow but rather knowing what the flow was set to.
How do the students set the flow?
Possibly you can just read the setting e.g. by using an encoder on the valve.

If you already have a workable mechanical design then you are further on than I was thinking.
I was going to mention that accuracy might be a problem with cheap off-the-shelf solutions, the ones I saw did not give a lot of technical information. One other issue will be size. Although you have no load to move the mechanism will still take up a lot of space in your box.

This might be of interest