braiden.org

Here’s a collection of projects I’ve been to lazy to write up. (more…)

I really like my Ethernet AC Controller. Its probably the most useful thing I’ve built. So when I decided to give PCB manufacturing a try, it was a good candidate for an upgrade. This post covers the (re)design and features of my new Ethernet AC controller. If you haven’t read my other posts, my goal here was to be able to control my air conditioner from my cellphone. (more…)

I’ve taken a break from my Verilog programming to better understand USB. My goal is to create some sort of FPGA data processor running over high-speed USB. The BASYS board includes a Cypress EZ-USB FX2 controller. I think the BASYS also comes with software for communicating with the board, but its windows only and a closed api so I haven’t looked into this at all. I’m trying to replace the Digilent’s firmware for the EZ-USB. This post covers some of what I’ve done so far. (more…)

Now that I’ve got ISE working, I’ve started to learn Verilog. Verilog is an HDL (Hardware Description Language) used to express the behavior of logic systems. Its been fun. I’m still adapting to the shift in paradigm. This post covers some of the resources I found useful, and some of the bloated crap I created while learning to code. (more…)

Now that my A/C works, I’m trying to find a new projects. I’ve been looking into plastics (ABS and Plexiglas), thinking about how to get revenge on bots spamming my blog, and reading about FPGA’s. Plastics are useful for building cases, but I’ve done OK hacking crappy enclosure together. It might be fun to mess with the bots, but I’m afraid of upsetting the Russian mafia who runs them. With no choices left, I decided to pick up an FPGA dev kit. (more…)

I finished merging the IR code (and hardware) with the tux graphics project. My air-conditioner now has a REST webserver. Getting hot? Just type “AC” in firefox and the air-conditioner turns on! The next step is finding a secure way to activate the device from my cellphone. The latest code is in SVN. (more…)

It works! I’m actually quite surprised. Outlook was pretty gloomy for a while, but I’ve got a simple HTTP server running on my atmega168. Here’s my experience with Tuxgraphics and AVRlib. (I haven’t given up on writing my own driver and tcp/ip stack, but I really wanted to prove the hardware worked first. Too many unknowns makes debugging really hard.) (more…)

Yesterday afternoon I finished wiring up the ENC28J60. Everything looks good so far. Both the hub and my dev board see the ethernet link-beat. I’m taking some time off to figure out what’s next. I can either copy the AVR project I linked in my previous post, or write my own driver and tcp/ip stack. Doing it myself could be interesting, but I’m concerned it will take too long. (more…)

Its been hard finding the time to work on my projects. I’m starting to suspect I won’t finish until summer passes and my A/C is useless. I did a quick and inexhaustive research on connecting a microcontroller to an Ethernet network. This post covers some of the options I found and the one i chose. (more…)

It works! I finally had success getting my IR transmitter to work. I update my code so that the signal transmission could be triggered by an external interrupt. Once that was done I could analyze side-by-side waveforms. I manually tweaked my code until it was in sync with the remote control, and success! This post documents the communication protocol for my LG 8008R. The next step is to hook-up some hardware to the internet. (more…)