UGCS Blinkenlights
The UGCS lab uses old circuit boards as wallpaper. When I was moving these boards, I realized that some of the boards have lights on them, and it would be cool if they worked. Thus, I decided to build a blinky light doohickey for UGCS. Of course, this immediately became a massive project involving the purchase of 50 feet of ribbon cable.
There will initially be five blinky light boards, each capable of controlling eight blinky lights. The data pins of a PC parallel port will serve as a multiplexed data and address bus; the main board will latch the address and buffer the data bus (just like EE 52). The current plan is to write all the software in python using pyparallel. This design is expandable up to 128 blinky lights. Each board will have four DIP switches to set its address.
Of course, the big question is what will happen when I try to control lights over 100 feet of unshielded ribbon cable. Hopefully this will just place an upper limit on the speed of the contraption.
[top] Status
3/29/05: the main board (which just provides buffering) is complete.
4/07/05: the main board (which provides buffering and latches the address) is now really complete. One of the blinky modules is complete.
