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 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…)

No luck. I’m trying to prototype an IR transmitter using an AVR micro-controller. My first try was a awful example of wave form generation; a piece of C code without a clock driven output. Instead of using a clock/timer which would have given me interrupts at exact intervals, I decided to do busy-for-loop-spinning delays to shape the signal. The result was a nasty error filled waveform. (more…)