Starting to gain control…
I finally managed to get a working “system” together after months of playing around and trying to learn far, far too many things at once. Not that it really does much at this stage, but as a proof of concept and a confidence booster it’s been very helpful.
The system is made up of 4 parts:
- An “echoserver” on a pc that waits for clients to connect, and sends anything that any connected client sends to it to all other connected clients. (I actually have 2 versions of this one: a “quiet” version that just does it’s job in the background; and a second version that shows all the stuff that comes through in a nice window so I could see what was being transferred through it and work out why it wasn’t quite what I expected).
- A graphical client that has some button on it that send commands to change some outputs through the echoserver. It also listens for responses to the command and changes the image and state of the buttons depending on the response. There could be as many of these clients as needed. The next stage for this client is to try to re-build it for my N800 touchscreen tablet. (If I can control the lights wirelessly from across the room then all of this might actually impress Bec!)
- A PC client that listens for relevant commands, and when it’s got one it like the look of it forwards it to a Microchip Pic microcontroller attached to a serial port. It also relays back the responses from the Pic to the network.
- The microcontroller unit itself. This does the fun stuff of… Ta Da! Turning some leds on and off! 8 individually controllable outputs at this stage, though it could easily be more or less… Excellent! Of course the microcontroller could really control anything, but leds will do for now until the system’s fully tested and debugged.
All in all it’s been fun, challenging, frustrating and rewarding to get all this together. A lot of thanks should go to a heap of people that take the time and effort to write tutorials on web sites, author clear books, and answer questions in internet forums. But there’s too many to thank, or even remember!
Now the hard bit. Working out what could potentially go wrong and seeing if I can break things, working out how to avoid those things, fixing them, then testing to see if I can still break it in new and exciting ways. Then rinse and repeat…..
Luckily winter’s coming!