Hi all,
I hope this is the appropriate group for my query. Quite a few seem like they might fit: automation, robotics, &c. but I choose you guys, because you're popular... (like high school all over...)
For my winter fun project I was thinking about attaching some "real world" true analog gauges to my PC. On the PC side I will do some scripting to scrape some HTML and determine how busy certain websites are, and then adjust the needle on the gauge to match. so:
Requirements: USB interface to PC, Ability to control via script, possibly via compiled executables on the PC. Analog outputs, a gauge or three (digi-key must have some, right? Grainger, I suppose if not.) Total cost < $100 (?)
I've got some (rusty) electronics background, and am comfortable with a soldering iron.
My questions are mostly around the big issues: What's the best architecture for this? PC -> Microcontroller -> output ? or is there some way I can skip the microcontroller?
How do I begin to decide what Microcontroller and dev environment to use? Seems like there are plenty of options. I don't have a clue on what I care about or what I don't. Recently I've been doing some high-level language stuff in Visual Studio, but I know that's over kill for the code for this project. For me, the fun of this project is really going to be on the PC side, in the code to aggregate Web info and decide what analog values to give that, so I'm trying to keep the PC to the display part of this as simple as possible.
And down to the details: I'd really like this to be controllable via USB. Is that adding too much complication?
Any help or pointers to blogs/articles/anything greatly appreciated. searches on PC USB and Gauge didn't really turn much up.
James Fraser