I've been fiddling with real world control in a small way. Major success is that I can turn 0-8 LED's on, or off, via the parallel port. This is a major achievement because it moved my near 20 year fetish with real world control from fantasy into the realm of the real.

much more on this topic... Note: Not into the realm of the 'cutting edge,' but into reality. I have a little board with eight LED's, and the LED's light up. Or go off.

The next move was to play with Servo Motors. A generous sould gifted me with a pic microcontroller based serial to servo motor controller, and the temporary loan of two servo motors.

Servo motors maintain their position, and can be controlled through an arc. These go 180 degrees. So you send a command and the appropriate server moves to where it should be.

Servo City has smaller servo's for $10-12, and up. The normal use for these servos is for radio controlled airplanes/boats/etc. You would attach a servo to the rudder of a boat, for example, and then when you turn a joystick the rudder would move from left to right.

You connect the controller to the serial port, then send commands to the serial port. Here is a command '0@' This means move the servo all the way to one side. '0|' This moves it most of the way to the other side. The '0' selects which servo (two on this board, but the design would support 8).

I'd paste a tiny snippet of Perl code that I was playing with this morning at 2:00 am, but something went wrong during this phase...

I wanted to see how fast I could cycle the motors from left to right, and the other way round. And somewhere in this code I sent a command that caused confusion, or something, and the upshot is that the computer no longer boots...

Which would be of no consequence at all, except that I was using a good computer...

But...it was a $40 Fry's special Motherboard, and it sort of sucked in strange and random ways, so it wasn't too bad. In fact, it was a good thing for three reasons:

It gives me an opportunity to revitilize a computer that was sort of marginal inspite of a 1.8 ghz Athlon. I don't need to mess with a flaky motherboard anymore because it is dead!

I learned a valuable lesson about designing and using io circuits. Optical isolation anyone?

I was barefoot, wearing just my robe, in the workshop at 2:00 am. If I hadn't blown out the computer, I WOULD PROABABLY STILL BE THERE, muttering under my breath and laughing evilly!