the Daniel Story

I am a programmer at mind and an electrics enthusiast in heart. So while programming an API interface around a PIC board for Guy-Tek’s latest product, I thought to myself why not try to learn more about electrics by programming a PIC. Now I’m not so great with the whole ASM and C world so I went looking around for a microchip that would be easy to understand so I wouldn’t have to learn an entirely new program language. I found a few, but to me the best ones are the OOPic, and Arduino. OOPic quite interesting with an Object-Oriented language with choices of a Basic, C, and Java syntaxes. While the Ardunino being only C syntax, it revolved around more of the computer - microchip communications. So I decided to first start with the Ardunino, being it was also cheaper it wouldn’t be such a large paper weight if I play dumb.

Although having the board for a week now I haven’t done to much since I am a basic beginner in learning how electrics work/behave. I have though been able to pass serial data to my computer, turn a row of LEDs on in a chasing manner. Scott (roommate) had at one time an iPod with the whole simple plug-in RF remote. Being the remote is no longer in use I began to hook it up to the Arduino board. Learning that iPod’s top plug-in interface was rather more simple than I had thought. Seeing that iPod accessories communicate with serial and having an standard protocol, it was easy to setup. I didn’t even need the Ardunio board, but I don’t have com port connector so I just used Ardunio’s serial Tx/Rx pins to pass the data to my computer.

I then created a simple class in VB.NET Express 2005 to parse the protocol and raise events of button presses.

All in all, I am no able to control my computer’s master volume and simulate ‘play’, ’skip forward’, ’skip backward’ key strokes so any application that features multimedia keyboard support will act upon them, ex: Winamp.

Like to see it in action? I recorded a crappy video of it (the video has no sound): Arduino iPod Remote [Size: 12MB]