Another Challenge for Electronics & Computer Geeks

[abhinavrakesh]

All Electronics & Computer Students i am calling you. Recently i see a card with remote which is capable of starting, shutdown, hibernation, standby capabilities. you can all do that with remote which comes with the card it costs Rs 3000/- i am here to create that kind of card just in 500 Rs so Electronics people and computer geeks can you help me do that (Electronics People can you design the circuit board for that which can connect to computer with any port it might be USB, USB 2.0, COM or any port and computer geeks can you help me to write the source code so that we can make that thing work i started writing the source code in C if it started working all the people who take part in this project will feel proud and who knows digit people print that project on top cover of the digit magazine.

The Card i Saw is Pinnacle Product i don't remember the code.

[Charan]

Do you remember where/how the device was connected to the PC. I had seen a circuit through which we can send key strokes to a PC through a IR remote. May be that ckt can be tweaked to support this.I still have the circuit diagram i think. It requires a ATMEL AVR Microcontroller.

Try to find out the pinnacel product .


BTW abhinavrakesh, im a Medical Electronics graduate .


EDIT: Guys i was going through the ACPI specs to findout how this can be done and daam!!! there is a hell lot of job to do to make this thing work. phew.....

[abhinavrakesh]

Pinnacle Circuit has USB 2.0 Connector it connects to USB Port and for the sensor a slot is biuilt in the circuit you connect that sensor to the slot and then stick the sensor to your table or anywhere near computer

[Charan]

@abhinavrakesh If you can find the link to the product please post it.

there can be three ways to do this.

1.The circuit which is connected serially with the keyboard. It will send all the signals from the keyboard directly. also there is a IR detector which is configured to decode RC5 Remote codes. The circuit can be configured to send one or two key combinations( like ctrl+x ) through the keyboards PS/2 port. up to 64 codes can be configured.
The circuit has no effect on the normal operation of the keyboard. the circuit can be trained. all you have to do is to press the learn button and the circuit goes into learn mode. Now press a key like PLAY and then press the keyboard combinations (like winamp has X key as play) and thats it . if u press the PLAy button in the remote, Winamp plays a song. This circuit can be tweaked to send Complex control signals. So mother boards support keyboard wakeup this can be used on these keyboards. The circuit is simple and doesnot require any software to be running on the machine. This circuit is also OS independent so even linux users can use it. this circuit was mentioned in Elektor electronics magazine 5 years ago.


2. the second method is to use the COM Port.Usually motherboards have wake up on ring feature. a circuit can be made to send a Ring indicator signal and the system can be turned ON.( I have to dig deeper into the ACPI specs to use on this) .

3. This method uses the USB to wake up. There are API classes to do this. But this one is the most difficult both in hardware and software . The DDK kits is available in the Microsoft website.

The second and third method requires us to wrirte our own device drivers.

Charan