stuart wrote: >> Back in the early '90's I had a...VFD...in my living room... > > To communicate with the driver, the main portion of the MVPMC > application opens a port and sends data to be displayed to the VFD > driver. At the conclusion of the communication, the port is closed. > So, I would say, 90% of the time the VFD driver is available to > anyone who wants to open the port through the MVPMC's ethernet port.
I do seem to recall reading that it was possible to control the VFD external to the MVP. Most be on the wiki somewhere. It was intriguing, but I couldn't think of any good applications for it. Back when I was using the VFD the main application was displaying reminders for TV shows (given it was in the living room). Now I rarely watch TV during the hours when shows I'm interested in are on, and of course MythTV has definitely obsoleted this need. > So, let's say you have an old modem in your computer that can pick > off caller-id. You could write a program to pop the message onto > your MVPMC's VFD. Yeah, I considered that, but audio is really the better medium for announcing caller-ID. If the MVP hardware could be picked up for $30 ~ $40 I could have used them as caller-ID announcer boxes. But you typically can't find MVPs that cheap, and even then, they aren't ideal, as you need to add an amp, speaker, and Ethernet wiring to each location, plus have some central infrastructure to capture the caller-ID and distribute the info over the net. Not to mention that the MVP hardware is otherwise overkill for the task, and probably not that power efficient compared to a more specific solution. I considered distributing analog audio to speakers at the various phone locations, or using wireless speakers (not very cheap, and I wasn't keen on having them constantly running and probably picking up the occasional bit of interference), but I ended up just buying some surplus caller ID boxes on eBay for under $20 each. They work adequately, don't require any additional wiring (as they plug in to the local phone jack), and even have the option of running on batteries so you aren't wasting energy on an inefficient power transformer. On the up side they're independent and don't require any central infrastructure (like a PC capturing and distributing caller-ID info), but have the one annoyance that each box needs to be individually programmed with the custom announcements for frequent callers. > Or, monitor motion detection video cameras (ala > http://www.zoneminder.com/). I have that on my "someday" list. I have a bunch of video cameras collected over the years that are just gathering dust. I'd like to deploy a few for security monitoring, but at this point it may be far simpler to go with a newer solution that includes a built-in server to send video over IP and a Wi-Fi interface. There was some talk on the list a few months ago about enhancing mvpmc to provide a UI for capturing security alerts and viewing video from security cameras. I hope to contribute to that someday... >> There's always the pins used for the serial port, if you end up not >> using it. > > Keep in mind the serial port is the console port. That is, during > boot up and afterwards, this is how the outside world sees what going > on and communicates with the MVPMC. My suggestion was to use one of the I/O pins currently used by the serial port to directly control an IR LED. A bit of spurious noise during bootup shouldn't impact that. > Regardless of MVPMC achievements, many of these low level drivers > remain a mystery. Then I guess using the port in that fashion would require digging up the hardware documentation. -Tom ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Mvpmc-users mailing list Mvpmc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mvpmc-users mvpmc wiki: http://mvpmc.wikispaces.com/
