Hardware hacking

Thursday, September 1st, 2005 at 11:33pm

Tonights Open Source Developer’s Club meeting was very interesting. Up first was Paul with his talk on mind control which was excellent.

However the second talk by Jon Oxer was more interersing as it reminded me of the plans I had for various projects. Much of Jon’s talk was about how simple it is to control other devices from the parallel port. One example he gave was how he could recieve an SMS on his phone whenever mail was put in his mailbox at home…

Some of the hardware projects that I have been thinking about for a while now are:

  • Getting a barcode scanner to make it easy to inventory all my books, dvds and even computers. (and if they don’t have barcodes then I could possibly print some out…)
  • Finish wiring up the LCD displays I bought about five years ago to the parallel port.
  • Then use the LCD displays for something useful
  • SMS gateway. This could be done by interfacing with an actual mobile phone and one possible use to to query my book database to see if I already have a particular book.
  • Temperature monitoring using the 1-wire sensors I have had for about 2 years now

However these are unlikely to move until the following move:

  • Sort out my computer collection. (this could actually benefit from the barcode scanner)
  • Consolidate my linux boxes which includes using an off the shelf router for the routing.

I just have to find the time…

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