Category: hardware-hacking

Links to fun & useful hardware hacking / physical computing sites.

• Physical Computing @ ITP
• Tom Igoe’s pcomp blog — he runs pcomp at itp and is very cool
• Links from Tom’s Etech2004 talk
• Dan O’Sullivan’s Physical Computing site

I’ve been struggling for the last month or so trying to find an 802.11b
coprocessor similar to the NetMedia SitePlayer
or Lantronix XPort.
Something that is easy to strap onto the side of a little microcontroller like a PIC
or Stamp, or maybe even could work stand-alone for simple tasks.

(Yes, eventually there will be the Lantronix WiPort
and maybe the DPAC Airborne will be made availble
to mere mortals, but until then wireless is sorta out of our reach)

Except that if all you want is to do wireless actuation without feedback,
one can get a free pager with a six-month contract for ~$40, rip it apart, intercept the data
going to the LCD (or hopefully there’s an earlier stage one can get at the real data sent)
and use it to trigger at least 1B diferent things (10-digit numbers).

Initial web searches prove kinda useless. Searching for “pager hacking” gives you lots of
2600-style crap about intercepting pager messages with PC soundcards.

Pololu Custom Laser Cutting offers an easy path for cheap and quick
machining of Lexan and other plastics.

For larger, more complex pieces, out of metal and other materials, perhaps
eMachineShop is a better choice.

• Promi-SD from Lemos International
  http://www.lemosint.com/scripts/bluetooth_promi.asp
  (kinda expensive, also check out the other BT products they have)
• EmbeddedBlue from Parallax
  http://www.parallax.com/detail.asp?product_id=30068
  (you may need to strap on a BASIC Stamp board)
• Bluetooth accelerometer
  http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/ccg/resources/btacc/index.html
  (it has a serial port BT device in there somewhere, I think it’s one of these:
  http://www.btdesigner.com/modules.htm
• http://www.vprf.com/vmx.htm
  (from SOCALWUG)

  commonly refered to as bluetooth serial cable replacement devices they can be found from many diffrent makers. These are fully intergrated modules that take serial in and spit BT out. Most need power of some sort but if you can find one that takes 12VDC then installing it in a car would be cake. Maybe even a small stepdown would work well, some cars even have other voltages running around. It would suck to have to change the battries all the time.

Once again,
Circuit Cellar magazine comes to the rescue. There’s both an advert
and an article that uses a new all-in-one wireless module.

It’s the
DPAC Airborne Wirelss LAN Node Module and it seems to be almost
exactly what I want.

• size; 1.26″ x 0.83″ x 0.46″
• power: 3.3V @ 420mA (transmit), 350ma (recv), 75mA (sleep)
• supports WEP @ 64/128 bits
• 8 digital I/O and a serial I/O, (and “up to” 8 channgels 10bit A/D)
• 36 Pin connector (?)

I can’t find any definite pricing, but the article says $80.
It’s unclear from the context whether that’s for the module itself
or the development kit.

Anyway, I’m excited. I’m ordering a few of these asap. Want.

The world needs a wireless coprocessor that functions like the
http://siteplayer.com/ and
the http://lantronix.com/ Xport

Sure, there exists
http://www.iosoft.co.uk/wlan2.php, but it’s very expensive ($200)

We need something cheap, ~$50-75.

The IP2000 is a cheap chip (< $10 in quantity) for doing 802.11b. It is a general purpose RISC cpu that's fast enough to do MAC routing in software. (is that correct?) Info from picklist: http://www.piclist.com/techref/ubicom/ip2k.htm

Low cost devkit:
http://home.netcom.com/~gregor_g/ip2022isp.html

An SBC using the IP2022-160:
http://ultradense.com/product_sbc.html

Ubicom page on the IP2000:
http://www.ubicom.com/products/ip2000/ip2000_processors.html

Picture of it being used in the Slimdevices Squeezebox:

http://www.slimdevices.com/images/inside_squeezebox/

Update 12 Feb 2004:
Drat, from what one of the Squeezebox guys have said, you must buy the $15k dev tools from Ubicom to do development. And, you still gotta buy a wireless card. This is not worth it.