STAMPAPPLICATIONS
PUTTING THE SPOTLIGHT ON BASIC STAMP PROJECTS, HINTS & TIPS
■ BY JON WILLIAMS
THE POWER OF NETWORKING
FOR AN ACTOR ATTEMPTING TO MAKE HIS WAY in Hollywood, the word
“networking” takes on a whole host of meanings. It’s a crazy business, really,
and what most of us find is that those with the same goals, e.g., becoming
an established actor, are not abundantly helpful to each other (a few are
downright malicious). So, “networking” — actor to actor, that is — is mostly
bupkis in my book. Now, I do have a “Hollywood” network, but the only actors
in it are very well established, if not particularly well known. Most of my
friends in the business do other things: make-up, special FX, etc., and the
person that I network with most is a guy named Peter who, like me, is one of
those techo-artistic types. Peter directs TV commercials, has worked for a
major studio directing a TV series and doing special effects, and oh, by the way,
just happens to be a fantastic electronics engineer who uses the SX in many
of his projects. He even maintains the SX-Key IDE for Parallax — how could we
not get along?!
About three or four times a month, Peter and I meet at
one of our favorite restaurants in downtown Burbank,
CA, just a stone’s throw from the Warner Brothers and
Disney lots. The food is great, the service is great, and they
never seem to mind that we will stay at the table long past
the pasta, mostly talking about electronics. We usually have
a little show-and-tell for each other, sharing current projects
and exchanging ideas. The meetings are always educational and, for me, it’s the best way to “do lunch” in Hollywood.
Peter has been incredibly generous with his knowledge,
particularly on a subject that I’ve been slow to approach:
microcontroller networking. Sure, I’ve done very simple
stuff, but having spent that last two Halloweens at Peter’s
home watching (with hundreds of others) his incredible
animatronics display, I am pushing myself to jump in and
give “real” microcontroller networking a go. Lucky for me, I
have the benefit of Peter’s experience on this topic, as he’s
spent the last several years developing and improving his
networked animatronics control system.
Several years back, Peter set out to design a very
flexible, fully modular animatronics control system that he
could manage from a simple PC. Well, having seen it in
action, I can tell you that he succeeded, and you can see for
yourself by visiting his website at www.socalhalloween.
com. His system runs on an RS-485 network with several
types of network nodes; the most sophisticated being the
14 January 2008
animation controller that is able to receive an animation
frame while playing another (the servo control output of the
animation controller uses an SX28).
My goals are somewhat less sophisticated than Peter’s,
though I’ve had them for quite some time. While I was living
in Texas, I read about a man who built an enormous custom
home; its size was somewhere on the order of 20,000
square feet. When he consulted the utilities companies, they
estimated that his monthly heating and air conditioning
expenses would be around $4,000. He figured for that
much money he could create a custom home management
system and when he did, his energy bills were reduced to
under $400 per month. Along the way, he discovered that a
lot of “energy efficient” appliances were not performing to
their stated specifications and he forced some manufacturers to restate their specs or fix the products.
Today, the concept of “going green” is very popular,
and it should be — a penny saved is a penny earned,
especially when it’s precious energy. So my system is going
to be very straightforward with the ultimate goal to monitor
and control my home from a simple PC; making it “smart”
and, if I do it well, energy efficient.
As this is the beginning of what I expect to be a long
journey, I’m borrowing another one of Peter’s good ideas:
I’m creating a prototyping system for an SX-based network
node. What this means is that my generic network node
