Me First! Home Appliances

[Grok]

Adron, you have experience in this area, so your advice is welcome.

I still remember my basic electronics and electricity from the Navy days when I worked on EA-6B Prowler Electronic Countermeasures attack craft.  So I have the basic skills, or more, to do some projects around the home that integrate to the PC.

To integrate a home appliance (I use the term to mean anything controlled by the PC that isn't the traditional personal computer peripheral like printer, scanner), there's the choice of I/O interface device.  Does one start with serial?  Parallel?  Maybe a manufactured PCI board specifically for home interfaces?

For home appliance programming, controlled by NT/2K/XP, would you want to write a service, or a WDM driver?

Finally, I know about a couple of your projects, and they are interesting.  Maybe you'll want to share what you've done with others here for giving ideas.  Have you done any others since?

Grok

[Adron]

To integrate a home appliance (I use the term to mean anything controlled by the PC that isn't the traditional personal computer peripheral like printer, scanner), there's the choice of I/O interface device.  Does one start with serial?  Parallel?  Maybe a manufactured PCI board specifically for home interfaces?

That depends on what you want to do. Think about more exactly what you want to do because that will determine what kind of interface you need. I like serial interfaces because they're cheap, easy to build and don't break that easily. A manufactured PCI board is likely to work great too, but would be much more expensive

For home appliance programming, controlled by NT/2K/XP, would you want to write a service, or a WDM driver?

That too depends on what you want to do. Maybe you'll want to write a combination. There's the Microsoft made Toaster driver that you could look at if you're writing a driver.... Otherwise, if you use a serial port you can just write a user mode service since serial ports can be used just fine from user mode, and if you purchase a manufactured pci board there is likely to be a driver for it already.

I haven't been doing any integrating appliances lately. The last thing I did was completely outside the computer and I can't remember what the second last thing was for sure.