18 Sep
1998
18 Sep
'98
2:32 p.m.
That doesn't always work. luckily, there's
one every year pretty nearby.
That's where I got my Tandy 1000 with 4 LPT ports (I don't know how they
all work, but they do, and I'm not gonna touch 'em). I was planning on
using it as the controller, and hooking up printer guts and making it work
by sending line feeds and spaces, and things like through BASIC.
If you go to Doug Jones' page at the University of Iowa:
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~djones
he has a link to some documentation and source code for gutting out
floppy drives so that you can control the stepper and spin the drive
motor.
I thought of doing two of those, put wheels on the steppers, use two to
push it around in various directions, mount a pair plastic replicas of
table-saw blades on the drive motors, mount those on top and then do some
code on a microcontroller that would look at an up-pointing photocell,
move the thing around until it was hiding under someplace dark, then wait
until some forward looking sensors saw movement and then pop out, spin
the phoney saw blades and trip one of those digital recorder chips to play
the sound of a chain saw or table saw and have it chase the
movement...just to scare the bejeesus out of people. =-D
Twisted fun for the whole family!
Anthony Clifton - Wirehead