This is one of my earlier but a bit more complex project which was inspired by the very cool Logitech G15 keyboard. I had a simple keyboard an I’ve attached a display to it that showed me various useful (?) info.
Hardware
The fact that this device was made in 2007 pretty much sums up that I used the parallel port of my computer as I did not have any knowledge about microcontrollers. By adding couple resistors to the display the interfacing to the LTP port was done. The role of the cable management unit was taken by an old mobile rack box. The display itself was an HD44780 compatible 2×16 character piece which since died in an accident of getting too high volage as a supply.
Software
At this time I was already coding in Python so it was obvious to use it in the control software. The was sent by a single command to the port. Previously I wrote an IRC bot called Szarvasember (Deer-man) which had all the fancy features and I was able to port some of those like querying the current TV show or the weather. Beside this I could show many interesting details of the computer that probably the G15 could do also, like the time, system uptime, CPU load, memory load, free space on the hard disk, etc. Later I’ve managed to connect it to Winamp as well so I could show the title of the current song however it could not do any interactions with the player.
I think this was the project which encouraged me to start getting into microcontroller as I saw that I could have more interesting features for this project if I had a better hardware.