Eeek! An update!

Post date: Mar 12, 2012 11:24:50 PM

My nemesis brought in a mouse the other day. Renewed interest in Visible. So I measured the cat door for installation and design of the tunnel. My wife screamed like a woman in a sitcom. she almost ended up on top of a dresser. She felt suitably ashamed afterwards. ^_^

I also made some progress on steps 3 and 4 of the tutorial. Mostly just links and description in the code version but the Cascade training one has a little more detail.

I think for the backlighting source I will take apart one of those older style taplight thingies. I think I still have one lying around. It will give me a large cloudy surface. I'll replace the existing light with a few LEDs to give me a slightly lower power version. I'll probably just hack into the power adapter to draw out power for this rather than have to worry about replacing batteries.

Speaking of power I was giving this some thought. I think after I get this working I might want to play around with figuring out a way to make the phone draw less power. The regular adapter will just continue to sync power as long as it's plugged in. That's no good for power bills or the phone battery. Not that it draws a whole lot of power but it will just keep doing so.

Either I want to find the lowest amperage/voltage that I can feed it and still get it to charge. Or alternatively since I'm going to be feeding control out of the device I can potentially create a switched control that turns the charger on at a low battery level and back on when it's full. Actually that'd be a pretty cool separate gadget for android phones anyway.

I need to poke around out on the interwebs and find the newsgroup posts I found about how to do serial out from the phone's USB port. Some day reasonably soon I'll have to solder a resistor and LED into an old plug so that I can write the code to test triggering the door.