DIY Shutdown Controller

starfox · 01-09-2005, 01:24 AM

Well, i finally got off my arse, drew up the schematics, revised the microcontroller code, built the thing and tested it and it all works!

So for anyone that's interested in building their own shutdown controller (as an educational experience, because overall this probably cost me more than buying one of Jeff's premade shutdown controllers), take a look at the website i've put together:
https://shima.rudora.net/index.php/Sayako

It's running on my linux box at home, and i hope there's enough upstream bandwidth! Else i'll mirror it somewhere at a later point in time.

I'm also going to write my own frontend for my car computer system (some details on my site above), but i won't post details about it until i have something that's worthwhile showing..

It's a bundle of code at the moment, and some parts work quite well, but it's very messy.

starfox · 01-14-2005, 11:48 AM

Added revision 2 notes which fix some problems.

MatrixPC · 01-14-2005, 12:33 PM

This is probably one of the project I am going to do as a learning tool after I finalized my installation.

darkhalo · 01-14-2005, 12:45 PM

this seems like a great project.. im only worried about the stamp programming part.. seems a little tricky

starfox · 01-16-2005, 04:35 AM

Ah it's a PICAXE, not a Stamp (the code looks a lot like BASIC Stamp because it uses a very similar instruction set). PICAXEs are really easy to program, you more-or-less connect them straight up to a serial port. I would've actually incorporated an in-circuit programmer into both of these boards (it's just three pins), except i have two dedicated programming boards already.

Hippy has some info about it here:
http://www.hippy.freeserve.co.uk/pic...load_Interface
If you take a look, it's very very easy to build. Connects straight up to the serial port.

They're a very simple microcontroller, and they're very easy to program, but as a result you can only do simple things like a shutdown controller with them. I'd give them a very strong recommendation if you want to start learning about microcontrollers... I'm going to look at AVR stuff next... they're a lot more complicated (program in C or asm) but they do so much more..