Cheap control + whole house display

[James <James@xxxxxxx>]

...long post mainly on topic and might be of use
(forgive the rambling;-)

With all the talk about control panels/displays I have resurrected an
old project to use a Palm as a remote control unit.  I originally
planned to connect a palm via serial to a PC.  The Palm would simply display and accept input, nothing more,  as the PC would figure out wh= at
to display and what to control.  I only wanted buttons, sliders and te= xt
on the remotes, anything more would slow things down too much and on a
palm screen be pointless anyway.  That was the original plan, this is<= BR> what I have now come up with:

Hardware
A Palm V connected via serial to a siteplayer which in turn connects to
a standard 10Mb TCP network. Serial is fine for a single device but I
wanted at least 10 so a standard IP network has to be the way to go.
This will allow for wall mounting or desk or handheld use as all the
hardware is fairly small.

Software
On the palm, a small app written in NSbasic. On the PC a VB server which connects via DDE and UDP to other programs for device control etc.  Th= e
palm software uses the full screen , has a page title, 10 buttons, a
home button and a next page button.  This is about all that can be
fitted on the screen in order to keep the buttons big enough to be
usable by a finger.

How it works
When a button is pushed a UDP packet is sent out, the VB server picks up on this and sends out via http a new screen to the palm to be
displayed.  It also sends a dde/udp message if set for the pressed
button.  Pages are simply title text(8chars), 10xButton text(8chars each) and a start packet.  Palms arn't that quick so simple data is easier for it to display than some XML/snap or whatever data.  This is=
definitely a KISS device. I plan a few "types" of screen, the mai= n 10
button type, a fullscreen message screen, something with 4(?) faders for light dimming and a few others but probably now more than 5 different
types(to keep things fast)

Speed
About .6 sec from pushing a button to a new screen being fully
displayed.  I guess a newer faster palm would improve on this a bit, b= ut
not by much

Cost (very guesstimate)
Palm - =A350 ish for a second hand visor
siteplayer - =A320
serial inverter - =A35?
cat5 filter - =A34
So the cost is reasonable and as it doesn;t matter if the palm is new or old ,palm/handspring/sony, availability should be good for 2nd hand.

Next????
As it stands it works which is a good start. So I will probably go on
tinkering with it but don't know if the idea is one that others might
like to use or one to stay in my head!,  so what do you all think??
a small help!
Does anyone have a full version of NS basic who could compile a program
for me, as I am only using the demo one at the moment as this is still a proof of concept.

James

Ps.  *nix users should easily be able to replace the server for a non = VB
one as all comms are done by standard protocols.

Yahoo! Groups Spons= or

ADVERTISEMENT

For more information: http://www=
.automatedhome.co.uk 
Post message: ukha_d@xxxxxxx 
Subscribe:  ukha_d-subscribe@xxxxxxx 
Unsubscribe:  ukha_d-unsubscribe@xxxxxxx 
List owner:  ukha_d-owner@xxxxxxx

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.