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

[quote author=Grok link=board=23;threadid=1511;start=0#msg11335 date=1054514984]
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?
[/quote]

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 ;)



[quote author=Grok link=board=23;threadid=1511;start=0#msg11335 date=1054514984]
For home appliance programming, controlled by NT/2K/XP, would you want to write a service, or a WDM driver?
[/quote]

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.