An Instructables published a week or so ago: If you have ever wanted to control electronic devices from your computer to control or regulate your environment, this instructable will guide you. In this example of computer control, a USB relay device (USBmicro http://www.usbmicro.com – U451) will control two 60 watt light bulbs from a PC [...]
I keep a lot of old things that I’ve made. Perhaps too many. In cleaning out boxes of old circuit boards – full designs, partial designs, experiments – I found a board that I had put to a lot of good use. Many times I’ll have a latched 8-bit port on a microcontroller that I [...]
The USBPIR exclusively available from CircuitGizmos is a passive infra-red motion detector that can be connected to your PC (Windows/Linux/OSX) via USB. The CGUSPPIR module assembly is a motion detector module combined with a U421. The module detects changes in the field of infra-red that is “sees”, and interprets that as motion. This project uses [...]
I created a tool that runs on the command line or “DOS box” that lets you use a U401 or U421 (output) in a batch file or other type of PC script. This is output only. You can set or reset the lines on the U401 or U421 using this executable file. The program is [...]
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 The Mail Light hardware could easily be modified to turn on some rotary warning lights, such as these lights from Woot.com. The example pictures below show the modification of a set of these lights to be driven by a U401 which works just as well as the [...]
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 In part one of this project I created hardware for the Mail Light. The idea behind the Mail Light project is to indicate the presence of emails that are currently on my email server with a flashing LED. This software runs on my PC and drives the [...]
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 The idea behind the Mail Light project is to indicate the presence of emails that are currently on my email server with a flashing LED. I am often not right at my desk and I would like to know if I have email. Or I am near [...]
This is a quick post showing a U401 (#CGU401) driving 16 LEDs. 12 of the LEDs are available here from CircuitGizmos. The square LEDs that are amber colored are just some extras that I had on hand.
The U401 and U421 USB Interface from USBmicro are an easy way to interface a number of real-world devices to the PC (or Mac/Linux). In many cases control of something as simple and straight forward as a relay from a PC would require more than just a minimum amount of effort. The U401 (U421) make [...]
