It has been a while, but I’ve been moving back to college and such and haven’t really had the time to write new blogs about technical topics. I hope that after this next week is through, my normal college schedule will be finalized and any bugs in the FamousPhil calendar / countdown system will be fixed (yes, there are bugs 
). This is a blog that I drafted about 4 months ago, but haven’t really finished until now, so I feel that now is an appropriate time to open the topic then provide video / photos later.
So, have you ever been asked the question “How many bureaucrats does it take to screw in a lightbulb ? ”
, or “How many consulting engineers does it take to change a light bulb?”, or even (my favorite): “How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb?”. I won’t answer these here since there are so many jokes and riddles, but if you are curious, look at these 2 addresses (my sources): http://wilk4.com/humor/humorm321.htm and http://www.twisted.dk/light.htm.
I now am faced with my own light bulb joke question, but this time, It isn’t a joke! It is real life problem solving!
When I automated my room with X10, I began effectively controlling the power line interfaces in my room to physically turn on and turn off appliances and lights in my room. I wrote an entire web page interface to control my lights from anywhere in the world with my mobile phone. But I have a few applications for my room that are still not implemented fully, that is, controlling appliances with an infrared remote control (like the tv clicker) from my computer without using the remote and controlling the door lock remotely so my door will be open when I get to it.
I will not be automating the door lock for some time, but I did want to make IR control work in my room. I purchased all the circuitry components from Radio Shack, and found a guide on building an IR remote for your computer here: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/86/2. I then asked a few of my hardware oriented engineering buddies to help me build this circuit (I hate hardware, I’m a software person). After numerous attempts, I got a crude version working. Unfortunately, this version wasn’t strong enough, so I decided to purchase a commercial solution called usbuirt. It now works perfectly and turns on a light bulb and a few other cool appliances in my room.
So what is this light bulb that takes an infrared input? Its my projector, quite simply. My projector has a special (quite pricy too) lightbulb in it that makes it project a computer screen up on my wall. I have gotten to the point where I didn’t want to control the project or stereo system via power control (it doesn’t let the bulb or equipment cool off enough), so I felt that controlling it by the remote so it could always stay on standby would be better. My system now has a movie mode on it to where this stuff works automatically and I plan on implementing volume adjustments for next semester so the movie automatically stays at a reasonable level for the duration (using a microphone). This was definitely a cool project to take on and I am so glad that I could get a few engineers together to have a little fun.
So to answer my original question… how many engineers does it take to turn on this light bulb? Well, I need to be in this equation because I am the computer scientist that had the problem. My friend John was in this because he helped me write the software (he is a Computer Engineer). Two other friends of mine were also present, both Computer Engineers with intensive hardware knowledge with a good software knowledge. I believe the answer to this equation is 4 engineers (since computer science is considered an engineering major here at UB).
In the near future, I will be implementing voice control using a condenser microphone. For those of you who don’t know what this is, its a studio quality microphone that has very little interference to produce the clearest voice possible. This mic also has a good pickup so the computer will hear me crystal clear across the room. When I get this part of my project done within a few weeks, I plan on making a followup post providing some of my code (mostly PHP) and how it works. I also plan on posting a video.
As always, thanks for reading and your comments are definitely appreciated!
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Tags: component, computer, engineering, fun, home automation, ir, php, serial, web development, x10
Posted in Personal, Technology
Great site…keep up the good work.
Great site…keep up the good work.
lefisgk- Thank you,gocrbcw.Great site.
sizgelc- Thank you,gyarqgt.Great site.
[...] it in depth enough to satisfy myself. Therefore, I decided to revisit the topic from that blog (which is here). This blog contains a video detailing the system that I ended up with during my University [...]