water cooler :: serial/parallel/usb control of appliances

I've touched upon something along these lines, but very long ago... with the help of something like Lego. Not sure if they were built-in or someone modded them before..
Sorry if that doesn't help you out much :P

Quote (mikshaw @ Feb. 03 2008,20:50)

I've been googling for sites that might be able to help me understand what is needed to create interfaces to appliances that can be controlled from a personal computer, but so far have come up with little results.

Can someone point me in a direction where I might get started?

Somewhere I have xeroxes of articles about:

Building USB interfaces;

Building a pager interface;

and probably others...

If I run into them, I'll shoot you the references.

The LEGO interface and be found by tracking down the FORTH hack of LEGO.

You might have a look at my post in hardware. I have had a working prototype for about 6 months now.

Richard

Have a look at the article "Hardware Hacking Revisited" in Linux Format Mar 08 page 57.

Quote (mikshaw @ Feb. 04 2008,21:03)

Quote

Depends very much on what you mean with "appliances", and which port you will use.

I'm sure details depend on these factors, but I'm not really talking about specific projects at this point. I just can't seem to find anywhere to even start. All I'm interested in at this time is *possibly* working toward a very simple project, something like lighting an external LED by clicking something...a starting point from where I can decide if I even want to go further with it. It's mainly the basic concept that I find interesting, but I'm not sure whether it's something I want to get into.

Thanks for the links, I'll check those out soon.

http://www.diylife.com/2008/01/25/make-a-usb-color-changing-light/

http://www.diylife.com/2008/02/02/show-pc-stats-on-analog-gauges/

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