i am experienced in basic on the apple from when i was younger. I am looking to set up a 2c to monitor several thermometers and an anemometer etc. Was waning to use one or both serial ports. Was also looking to open and close windows. Any good books on making your own devices for the serial ports? Is there another device i can hack? i have a basic understanding of electronics.
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In my mind, without expansion slots, the easiest way is to program an external micro-controller with a serial interface to gather data and report it. Same thing with operating motors.
Looks like there are commercial off the shelf options for the RS-232 temperature probes. Here is an example.
http://www.sensorsoft.com/st6105j.html
You can probably also find stepper and linear motor controllers with RS-232 interfaces, if you don't want to figure out how to do it, yourself.
Hi,
Vernier comes to mind at this URL.
http://www.vernier.com/legacy/apple/
X10 with a CP290 interface.
http://www.x10.com/homepage.htm#aut
http://www.laureanno.com/
One last one to give you some Ideas, check out his other projects.
http://www.drivemeinsane.com/?cam=19
Later send me a PM
Take Care
Quite a few commercial weather stations have serial ports on them. Most simply spit raw messages showing the current readings out the serial port at regular intervals. I had one of these, came in a kit with temperature sensors, anemometer, rain gauge, etc., and there is sufficient information floating around the web to write your own client for it.
Buying a kit like that would avoid rat-holing on building your own temperature sensors, I guess. The one thing I will say... as much as I'd like to recommend the Oregon Scientific package the outdoor sensors all started failing within about a year.
As to opening/closing windows an X-10 controller might be your best bet if you want to drive something via serial. They still make serial Smarthome controllers and there's ample open-source software out there you can reference to drive one. X-10 will get pretty unwieldy if you want to control *many* things or want to be able to control things in steps other than "all the way open/all the way shut", however.
Way back in the good ol' days of the early 80s, I connected a couple of thermistors to the game paddle ports on my ][+. You have to choose the range and resistance of the thermistors appropriately, and they are not linear. It's probably easier to use a look-up table to get the temperature than try to implement an equation in Applesoft.
You could do the same thing with a wind vane, which in most consumer level weather stations is a potentiometer (variable resistor) without any stops.
I dunno if a reed switch anemometer could be successfully implemented on a game paddle button or not. The switch closes once per revolution, so you'd have to either count a timer between switch closes, or count closes in a given amount of time, and convert accordingly.
If you had something other than C, I'd say to look for a Novation Apple Cat modem card. That has an X-10 interface and the assembly language to drive it. I still have an APPLE ][+ home automation controller I built.