I have been busily working away at building infrastructure for the Dare to Dream Difference Challenge. Since my last post, I have finished the hardware prototype, although I still need a cabinet. The project now consists of a Device Solutions Tahoe II development board, an XBee Series 2 module, an AR1010 FM Receiver, an LM4832N audio amplifier, and two 0.5 watt speakers (pictured here). Not pictured is the ZigBee base station. I have made a shift in the approach I was taking for the software. Originally,...
After a week of coding, I now have the first signs of a bedside clock! The first milestone of my project was to get the XBee network stack up and running where I would have a desktop computer and an embedded device talk to one another. To reduce the risk of getting both devices talking I wanted to have the exact same code run on the desktop and the embedded device. I went about this by creating a class library project targeted at the .NET Micro Framework and another class library targeted at the...
My kit arrived on Friday for the Dare to Dream Different Challenge. Very very cool. The only minor disappointment was that the supplied XBee modules were Series 1. Fortunately, I had a few 2.5 modules laying around from a past project that I upgraded to ZB. Fortunately for me, Michael Schwarz created a library that contains code to talk to 2.5 and later modules for the desktop and micro frameworks. After a few hours of leaning how his library worked (and not worked with Series 1) and upgrading XBee...
Now I am officially in round 2. I didn’t realize I had to fill out some forms to make sure that I met the contest rules. Fortunately, that is all behind me now, and my development board is on it’s way. Which doesn’t give us contestants a lot of time. Round 2 ends March 31, 2009, which is a little over 2 months away. I plan to blog about my progress. Right now, I am in the “getting reacquainted with Micro Framework” that I last looked at a couple of versions ago. I had bought the book “Embedded Programming...
Wow! I was accepted into Round 2 of the Dare to Dream Different Challenge by winning Round 1. Round 1 consisted of making a proposal of what your dream device would be and telling a little about yourself. My dream device is a bedside digital assistant. It is much more than an alarm clock (although it will have that feature). Through the use of RSS feeds, it will act as a morning newspaper, weather report, and digital picture frame. It will have some other features that I always wanted at my bedside,...