Overbuilding an iTunes rating system

February 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Even though iTunes and it’s song rating system has been around for over a decade now, [Steve] still hasn’t gotten around to assigning ratings to his vast library of MP3s. We can’t blame him – who wants to pull up iTunes every four minutes and assign a star rating to each song individually? To solve this interface problem, [Steve] set out to design a hardware song rating interface that fell down the rabbit hole into development hell.

The build started off simply enough – just an Arduino attached to a few buttons that sends data to a Cocoa app which rates the current song. Everything was working wonderfully until [Steve] restarted his mac and the COM ports went to pot. Wanting a ‘plug-and-play’ solution, he did away with the Arduino-based build and started designing a USB device that would display the current iTunes track and provide hardware buttons for rating the current song.

The current build is based around a very capable PIC 18F4550 micro. After looking up the USB HID protocol, [Steve] had some boards fabricated. He’s keeping us waiting on a final build report, but with the amount of work that went into this project, we’re sure it’ll be a winner.

Filed Under: peripherals hacks Tagged With: , ,

Learning to use the V-USB (AVR USB firmware) library

February 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The V-USB library is a pretty handy piece of code that lets you add USB connectivity to ATtiny microcontrollers (it was previously named tinyUSB). But if you’ve ever looked into adding the library to your own projects you may have been stymied by the complexity of the code. There are many examples, but there’s a lack of a concise quick-start for the uninitiated. [Joonas Pihlajamaa] has been working to correct that shortfall with his four-part V-USB tutorial series. It’s not for the absolute newbie; you should already be comfortable working with AVR chips but that’s the only real prerequisite we can see.

He starts the series with a look into the hardware considerations. USB provides a 5V power rail but the data lines expect 3.3V logic so this must be accounted for. With the test rig built on a breadboard he moves on to pick apart the code, covering various user-defined variables that you’ll need to set based on your project’s needs. We’re going to keep this on the back burner and hopefully the Troll Sniffing Rat will get a makeover (although we must say comments have been a lot nicer as of late… keep it up!).

We’ve embedded links to all four tutorial parts after the break.

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Filed Under: Microcontrollers Tagged With: , , , ,

A USB-controlled Solder Reflow Oven

February 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Joel] of [Helion Microsystems] is at it again with his USB controlled solder reflow oven.  You may remember him from his crazy twitter-enabled Ewok model. Although these two projects are quite different, they both use the HU-320 USB breakout board that he’s in the process of getting funding for via [Pozible], or Australian Kickstarter for Yanks.

The reflow oven works using a thermocouple-enabled RS-232 voltmeter to output the temperature to the HU-320 board. [Joel] has been nice enough to provide us with the C# code to interface with many multimeters if you want to implement a similar project.  Temperature is controlled with a mechanical relay for what would appear to be a poor man’s PID controller.

Sadly, Fluke meters don’t seem to be listed, but your place of work probably wants their meter back anyway!  For another toaster reflow oven implementation, check out this [HAD] article.  Be sure to check out the video after the break for a video of the setup! (heat treat engineers may find the “recipe” format humorous).

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Filed Under: cooking hacks Tagged With: , , ,
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