Posted on 07 May 2008
The EnvStick is cheap, homemade temperature sensor that plugs into a USB port. It provides a simple way to collect a room’s ambient temperature.The EnvStick shows up as a serial port - a COM port on Windows boxes. You can see the typical output (on a program like Hyperterminal) - it waits a specified number of seconds, spits out a temperature reading, and starts waiting again. If you press “p”, you can set the number of seconds in between each temperature reading.[more]
Posted on 23 Apr 2008
This is a small project to provide email notification via an RGB LED hooked up to the USB port.Uses a 4d-micro-USB module to provide power and RS232 to a Picaxe 08M controlling an RGB LED. Can control colour (seven colours: work email in red, newsletters in green, other in blue) and brightness by sending characters to the COM port, this is done by a Python script run every 10 minutes by Task Scheduler with an accompanying system tray icon to allow LED to be turned off again.[more]
Posted on 13 Feb 2008
This is a MIDI box interface. There’s an input connector and an output connector. The boxes’ output connector goes downstream to the next boxes’ input connector. There’s a DIP switch in each box to select which of the 16 channels the box will respond to, and what device the first light will respond to. The four lights and the relay will respond to four consecutive device addresses.This design can be modified to use standard baud rates, and the RS-232 Electrical interface. Then you can just fire off commands via RS-232. Cakewalk would be a little difficult to interface to if you just wanted to make a home lighting system that responds to opening doors and time of day. For that you just wip something up in Visual basic using standard com port commands.[more]
Posted on 12 Feb 2008
This is an ATmega163 base Wireless Glove Project.It consist of main two parts transmitter and receiver both use AM link.On the transmitter,the microcontroller reads the values of the voltage dividers determined by the position of your fingers. The internal program constantly loops and reads these values. It then converts them to digital and sends them out the on board UART. The data is send out at a 4800,n,8,1 format. Which means a port speed of 4800, 8 data bits, and 1 stop bit. Finally the UART pin feeds to an AM modulated link which is transferred to radio waves.In the receiver the AM link picks up the radio waves and converts them back to a digital format. The receiver feeds this data to a Max232 line driver. This line driver converts the 0 to 5V signal to a +12 to -12 RS-232 format. That is then feed to one of your COM ports.[more]
