How to hook strange things up to your computer The HOWTO Page

The HOWTO Page

This page will instruct you on how to set up everything I have operational on this site. The page is currently being redesigned to be easier to read and hopefully understand, and less mindless ramble like it was previously. Also I plan to include lots of pretty pictures, because as we all know, visual aids make it easier to learn things, or at the very least, it gives you something to look at in case you don't want to read, but still want to pretend you did.
Setting up a Webcam
Wiring your doorbell to the Internet
Wiring a relay to the parallel port
Using X10 to control your appliances
Building a LED scrolling marquee sign.
Panning a cam with a stepper motor
Controlling zoom on a camcorder
Driving an RC car by computer
Designing and Building the Critter
Streaming Live Audio
Controlling Music Remotely
Tracking Consumables
Add Your Cam to the Site
Javascript code and explaination to display the webcam image.

Scrolling Marquee Sign

You know what I'm talking about. Those scrolling light displays. Well, I'm going to build one, and if you want to tag along, so can you. This project is for novelty purposes and experience more than a means to save money on a professionally built marquee sign. For the same amount of money you can get something that works out of the box with a warranty and probably a self-contained programmable interface. But what fun would all that be?

First things first. Know something about electronics and TTL logic circuity. I THOUGHT I knew before I started. I learned a lot along the way. I've had to basically start from scratch 3 times as I encountered various obstacles, and I'm not finished yet, but I think I've crossed all the major hurdles now and all that remains is the timeconsuming monotonous work.

First gather your supplies. You'll need a computer with a parallel port (a linux system if you want to use my code verbatim, although it should be portable with minimal fuss). I've purchased pre-etched boards that convienently have 8 columns to work with. Each character is 8x8, so you'll need 64 LEDs, probably all the same color, but its your sign, so do as you please. You'll also need one 74LS273 Octal D-Flipflop IC and 8 switching transistors (2n2222 work). Add a 7805 voltage regulator and a power supply that pushes at least 8 volts DC (a 9V battery can suffice for a while). The design is modular. To extend the sign, you simply append another 8x8 array board, minus the regulator.

The theory behind this sign is as follows. Each LED has an anode and a cathode. Each LED in a column shares the cathode and each LED in a row shares the anode. The 8 data lines from the parallel port connect to the 8 anode rows. Each cathode column is connected to the collector of a transistor. These transistors are triggered by the D flipflop which is wired to ripple a single bit through the 8 bits of that circuit. This way, one and only one transistor is active at any time. The computer will output whatever LED's need to be lit on the current column, wait a few microseconds, turn off the LED's, pulse the 74ls273 then turn on the LED's for the next column. This process repeats until the end of the sign is reached. The cycle then repeats. An 8 character sign should be able to refresh about 120 times per second easily.

To create a monochrome effect, some LED's can be lit only every other refresh. This will result in a LED that appears to be only half the brightness of the others. Several levels of brightness may be achieved by this effect, but if a more broad range is required multiple bits per LED will be required and filtered through resistors to get the desired brightness.

To add additional characters, simply carry over the 8 data lines, the output from the 8th flipflop, the +/- lines and the clock line. The regulator can handle up to 1A of current which will be plenty for a sign of any concievable length since only the flipflops need to be powered at any one time. All the LED's are powered by the computer itself.

For multiple colors instead of just shades of a single color, take a red, green, and blue LED, wedge them together, then center a spacer above them. cover the board except for the spacers so you see the combined light only. You then need to provide each individual LED the desired shade, instead of only one LED per position. This means you'll need 3 bits of information for each position instead of only 1. This isn't bad considering you can get 64 colors easily from those 3 bits. Your mileage may vary.

Take a sharp object and scratch off the contacts on the top and bottom of the board so that each column is electrically separate from the others To be continued......

Source Code Now Available

I am now making the source code for the lamp, doorbell, and stepper motor available for download. You may make any use of this source code you like, but if you make changes that are useful, please send me updates so I can incorporate them back into my system as well.

None of the source is complete. Its in a working state, but there's still a lot I want to do with it, so it will be updated from time to time as I incorporate those changes.

As for functionality, I only make the following statement: It works for me. You're welcome to ask questions if you have problems, and I will try to help if I can. Also, before you even THINK about hooking up some homemade circut to your computer, consider the fact that its very possible to fry computer components, especially with the parallel port circuts, if you don't construct them properly. Therefore, it would be wise not to hook your lamp circut up to your new PII 400. 486's can be had for less than $30 these days. All you need is a network card and you can control all the devices from remate. This software has been written to take advantage of a network.

The basic requirements are a linux system, a joystick port (for the doorbell), and a parallel port (for the lamp & motor). You also need kernel support for the joystick port and parallel port. Kernel versions 2.2 and up have joystick support built in, but I know 2.0.30 did not and needed to be added separately as a module. I leave you to figure out your configuration issues.

Doorbell Files:

Client

Server

Lamp Files:

Client

Server

Barcode Files: (Warning, these are a MESS and don't even work right. :)

Text based client

CGI program to generate the Inventory page

Program to generate the individual inventory tracking log

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