8-Switch Panel

This project was something simple that had been mulling around my mind for a while, and made my freshman year. I DJ'd in High School, and for controlling my lights, I purchased a power-strip type device that had 8 switches on the front, and 8 outlets on that back that were, you guessed it, controlled by the switches. This was nice, because it allowed me to turn each device on and off individually. My freshman year, I was inspired by the video of the house that had Christmas Lights that flashed to a Trans-Siberian Orchestra song. To create a similar setup without spending gobs of money, I found a solid-state relay that was activated by the voltage put out by the data pins on the parallel port, and could handle the wattage drawn by lights. Once I had the relays, it was very easy to simple solder a bridge that would duplicate the functionality of the switch through the relay if it were activated, and attach each of the eight relays to each of the eight data lines from the parallel port. One challenge I had was to identify what wires in the parallel cable were the data lines, and what order they were in, but an application that activated one at a time and a voltmeter make that relitively easy.

Once I had the hardware working, I needed to develop an application that would take advantage of the automation capabilities. I decided that the best way to give it similar functionality to the video would be to make the application take a text file of cues, then cycle through the cues on a button press so that the lights could be synced up to the music. Additionally, I had included an automation function in the application that attempted to calculate how quickly the button was pressed, then identify what the tempo was and continue cueing once the tempo was set. The cue file I made by having each line be a new cue, and the line consist of 0s and 1s to indicate that that channel was off or on. For example, 00010100 would use all 8 outlets, with all off except 4 and 6. The application converted that into an integer and transmitted it over the parallel port and, when that integer was converted by the parallel driver into electrical signals, it resulted in the required wires putting out a voltage. For one song, I made a cue file that was several hundred lines; the grew quite rapidly. It was somewhat of a challenge to get the song started and begin cueing right away, but when you got it synched up perfectly, it was really cool. As an added bennefit, the switches still function as originally, so no functionality was taken away.

LED Grid

This project is something that I have been working on for the past 3 years, and was finally able to finish a couple months ago. I got the inspiration for this project from a swimming pool jumbotron that had groups of 4 LEDs that combined en masse to create a giant screen. I figured that if I could control 8 channels from the parallel port, I should be able to figure out something to control more channels to make a rudimentary screen with 3-color LEDs. I started on this project with the application that was to control the grid. At this point, I had no idea how i would get the data to the screen itself or run that, but to start I needed something worth putting up. I started with some very basic designs that wiped a bar any number of pixels wide up, down, left right, diagonally etc around the screen to learn the logic. Then I combined them to make more designs with multiple colors and patterns. After the designs, i made an alphabet and created a marquise that was user-settable, and images that could move across the grid. While working on the computer, I had a process running that emulated the box by outputting HTML representing each light to a file and showing that page in a control in the UI that refreshed several times each second. Additionally, I found a control that someone had made that gave the overall sound output level of the computer (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/directx/volumemeter.aspx?df=100&forumid=328840&exp=0&select=1956575). I created an algorithm based on that to figure out what the beat of the song was, and them made an option to have the pattern change color with the beat.

After I had the software portion pretty well started I began work on the grid itself. I had read a good bit about how LCDs were made and how to control 12 LEDs x 12 LEDs x 4 leads = 576 channels, and was aware that I had to multiplex the display. Multiplexing consists of activating one row at a time and cycling through them extremely fast, taking advantage of the human eye's persistence of vision to make it appear solid. Because of this, I could take the number from 576 to 48. soldering so many LEDs, however, could have very easily gotten to be an absolute mess of wires, so I did what you can see below in the pictures, which I think is rather pretty. The RGB lines go across, and the anode lines go vertically, and they all go to a block connector that has a ribbon cable connecting it to the breadboard with the electronics, allowing it to be worked on much more easily. The LEDs are mounted in a piece of plexiglass every inch, in holes that I drilled, then hot-glued in. This was ultimately mounted into a box with a frosted piece of plexi in front of it, which gives them much better dispersion and makes it look like solid light instead of many small points.

The circuitry was the reason that the project took 3 years to complete. Since there was no way that I was going to be able to control 48 channels with a parallel port, I found a microchip that could control 24 LEDs (or channels as I used it) by feeding it a signal with a clock, then latching it in and grounding the pins that were given a high signal to complete the circuit to attached LEDs (http://www.allegromicro.com/en/Products/Part_Numbers/6276/). Stringing three of these together gave me the 48 channels that I needed, so that was a step in the right direction. Since 12 of the channels needed to be power supply rather than ground, I added an array of 12 PNP transistors that gave me the functionality I needed for that.

All this was completed my sophomore year as well, but this was the point at which I got stuck. In order to feed the LED controlling chips data to multiplex the array at all, I had to have something with the capability of sending out the required signals, and then would be able to interpret a signal from the computer with what it is supposed to display. At that time, the only thing that I and anyone I talked to could come up with to serve that purpose was a microcontroller. I had absolutely zero experience working with anything like a microcontroller, however, so after many hours trying to work that out, I shelved the project.

A few months ago, I was talking to a friend about his senior design project for Electrical Engineering, and he mentioned a chip that was a USB controller and gave 8 pins of control at high speed to a breadboard and had a C# plugin allowing it to be used with almost no effort (http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/EvaluationKits/UM232R.htm). Immediately, I recognized that this could eliminate the need for a microcontroller and allow me to finish the project; I ordered one the next day. The time from when I received the device to when it started working on the actual grid was only a few hours, which I think is pretty awesome - most of the code I wrote with very little testing and the circuits I designed with no history of circuit design or way to test them worked perfectly. It took a few tweaks on the code and device, but it is now working great. The only functionality that is not working is the volume level control; for some reason it is not registering any sound, and I did not design the control so I can't really debug it very well. I built a basic container for it with the frosted screen and all, and eventually may put it into the top of a bar. This works in a manner very similar to how the 8-switch panel sends out data; it converts Booleans to a number which is sent out to the USB/pins controller and is outputted giving the proper pins signal.

In looking to what else I can do with this project, I am considering designing a PCB that could be used with this with the LEDs on one side and the contents of the breadboard on either a brother board or the backside of the main board, so that it can have a higher LED density, as well as potentially making it extendable with connections on all four sides to connect the individual components together so that they can work together as a large screen. The code that I have is extremely easy to change for a larger grid size (it would probably only take an hour or so to make it adjustable), and that would be a really cool way to give it more real-world applications, as well as potentially mass-producible. While devices that do essentially the same thing already exist, I'm quite proud that I was able to design this from scratch with only a very basic analog circuit fundamentals class. Please let me know if you want more detail on the circuit design and series of signals to produce the desired output; I figured that would not be of interest to anyone else except someone working with the same LED controlling chips, which I can recommend as working quite well if you are doing a project with a lot of LEDs.

RFID Unlocker

This is part 2 of the door openers.

After I moved out of the dorms into a house, I concluded that i needed another door opener system for my room door. However the system that I used in the dorms of pulling the handle down to unlock the door no longer worked. Additionally, I wanted to upgrade to RFID so that I did not even to have to take the card out of my wallet. The RFID board that I used in this project is a Phidgets RFID USB module (http://www.phidgets.com/products.php?category=14&product_id=1023 , I got mine for $10 from Ebay), which has a couple really nice features. First, it is USB, which means that I am not limited to older computers that have parallel ports. Second, it has an awesome driver and C# .NET module that throws a system message when a tag is read. This makes it extremely easy to just write a method that is called each time that the application 'sees' the appropriate message. Finally, the board contains 2 pins that can be controlled from an application that can put out enough power to activate a relay. I created an application that listened for the appropriate message and dealt with it that generally lived in the system tray, but also had a small interface with information about the most recent entry. To control what tags were allowed entry, I created a file that would be referenced that contained allowed tags and their respective owners. The application then logged each tag so that I could go back and see what tags were tried, if they were identified, and what the result was (opened/not opened). To handle actually opening the door, I purchased a fail-secure electronic door strike for ~$20 that, once a voltage was applied to the pins, would allow the door to simply be pushed open. I used one of the control pins on RFID board to activate a series of relays that activated the door strike, allowing the application to let the door be pushed open. Put them all together on a dedicated computer with battery backup and voila, it works. I attempted to have everything (USB data, 5v, 12v, strike activation return) go over a cat6 cable to the box to increase security, but was unable to get USB to travel over the cat6 (I read many articles on it, and think that the reason is because it already goes ~8 feet when it hits the cat6 injector, then an additional 4 feet or so over the twisted pairs, and signal degradation is just too much over that distance). In the pictures, the black USB B connector in the box that is just hanging there is left over from that attempt.

Dorm Room Door Cardswipe Unlocker

When I was a Sophomore, I was living in Purdue's Cary Quadrangle dorm, and decided that my door was far too low-tech and needed sprucing up. What I decided on, was making my door automatically unlock somehow. Since I was not able to modify the physical door in any way, I had to find a way to have it do so without changing the doorjam, installing anything permanently or impeding the normal function of the door (for safety regulations).
For the method of opening the door I had to have something that was nondescript enough that it wouldn't be stolen or broken, but also wasn't something that could easily be hacked, because that would defeat the purpose of locking the door in the first place. After doing some research on what would fit within my limited budget, I found a used magnetic stripe reader on ebay for $15 that interfaced with a standard keyboard port. This was doubly nice, because it would allow me to use a standard Purdue ID card as the key, and others could be entered with just their Purdue ID number, which was coded onto the card.
Having come up with a solution for getting input, I could then move on to how I would unlock the door itself once a person was confirmed. This was an issue that stumped me for quite a while, because of the constraints of not modifying the door impeding door functionality. What I eventually came up with was a motor that ran off of 9v and ran through a massive gearing-down that pulled down a rope, which pulled down the handle, which unlocked the door (the first image below). I was really lucky with the type of door handle that we had, because it only was openable from the inside by pulling down, and pulling down on the locked door unlocked it. As a result, the rope that attached to the motor just went slack when it was opened normally, and it just had to pull the handle to unlock the door.
The second image below shows the circuitry that controlled the motor, which turned out to be a lot more complex than you might think. To interface with the computer, I found a class that allowed extremely easy control of the parallel port. The result of this, was that I had 8 pins that I could easily turn on or off, and would provide ~1.5v to the active pins. I found solid state relays that were perfect for this purpose. SS relays are basically electronic switches that connect 2 pins when a small voltage is applied to the other 2. While this was good for activating the motor, I also needed a way to be able to reverse the motor, and for that I needed a mechanical relay. For that I had a SS relay that was activated from the parallel port activate a mechanical relay to reverse the motor's direction (to let the handle back up). Finally, I found that some of the time, the motor would keep running, because there was a trickle of power running through that kept the circuits closed, so I added an additional set of relays that disconnected the power supplied (9v for motor and 12v for relays) from mains power.
This box I kept in a drawer with the computer that controlled the door, and it had a long keyboard cable running to the card reader, 2 wires running to the motor on the door, and mains power.
Once I had all the mechanical parts finished, I needed the code to run all of it. I had the parallel port class that allowed me to control physical things from code, so that part was easy(once I found that). The computer that this app was running on was an old laptop with no screen that would be sitting in a drawer accessed via remote desktop, and I wanted an easy way to modify the user control list. For this, I had the program copy an access control file from a network drive every hour that contained Purdue IDs and names so that it could be logged back to the server in case something went missing. For getting the data from the card reader, the reader sent a specific series of characters and emulated keystrokes whenever it read a card, so I made a service that listened for that series of keystrokes, parsed the ID from it, and acted accordingly.
As an interesting sidenote, I recently found out that my card reader has become somewhat of legend in Cary, and people are still talking about it 2 years later. Awesome.
This was the version that I had in the dorms, and once I moved to a house where I could modify things, I made version 2, which I will go over in my next post. Let me know if you have any questions!

Hello World

First off, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Dan, and I am currently a senior at Purdue University studying computer and information technology, with a focus in information systems. I am also in my fourth year of being a member in the Purdue Varsity Glee Club (where I both sing and run sound), and have had the fantastic opportunity to travel all over the country and world with the group. Professtionally, I have worked at Ethostream, a small networking company, Northwestern Mutual, a nationwide financial network, and the Nielsen Company, who provides consumer information to thousands of businesses all over the world. I have acted in the role of developer, researcher, data analyst and designer, and through all of those I have gained a passion for anything that I don't know yet.

Over the past couple years I have put together a number of projects that are pretty cool and use a wide range of technologies from C# and Java to RFID, LED arrays and . Over the next couple weeks, I hope to update this blog with information about all of those projects, as I have benefited countless times from the experience of others and not it's time for me to share what I can. Ludi incipiant!