from the the-advantage-of-an-old-school-hand-crank dept.
Over at his personal blog, Kevin Norman describes how he has modified his motorized standing desk to raise and lower on its own according to a schedule. His post DeskOps: Commanding My Desk with HTTP - How I Brought Hysteresis Problems to the Desk Where I Solve Hysteresis Problems goes into a fair amount of detail about how he went about wiring it up and the problems which arose and how he fixed them. The active part uses an ESP-32 based microcontroller to change the desk's height using the I²C protocol.
For those not familiar with hardware, I2C is the scheme by which most circuits use for inter-chip communication. In my desk controller, there is a microcontroller which writes data to a LCD driver chip, which in turn lights the correct segments on a 3 digit segmented LCD. How would I capture the data though? Easy, I thought! All I had do to was hook up to the same two pins the data sheet reported as being the i2c pins along with the grounds of the standing desk controller and my esp32, and I could then "sniff" the data that was being sent across the i2c bus, decode it, and then use that for something useful.
So away I went! I soldered two wires directly to the pins on the chip that were marked as the data pins (I am deeply sorry to anybody offended by my soldering job!), and soldered a third wire to a ground point on the board. I then connected those wires to an ESP32, and then went looking for somebody elses code to try to sniff the i2c data to see if this was even possible.
He even designed and 3D-printed an enclosure for this modification. It played a surprising role in this.
(Score: 5, Informative) by RamiK on Sunday April 28, @06:27AM (2 children)
Cheap and there's foss software and everything... Lots of drivers for linux and android device components (batteries... sensors... screens... digitizers...) wouldn't have had open & mainline driver without them.
Sparkfun did a nice tutorial on the workflow here when marketing their own: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/using-the-usb-logic-analyzer-with-sigrok-pulseview/all [sparkfun.com]
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 28, @02:27PM (1 child)
Them and Adafruit are two of my favorite sites on the Web.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday April 29, @04:29PM
Adafruit is a bit expensive, but it's nice that places like it exist on the internet.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Username on Monday April 29, @01:46PM
To have this amount of time and resources to do this?