Please help put this together (in my mind)

[Panagiotis Atmatzidis]

Hello,

I'd like to build a sort of closet with 9 automatic drawers (3x3). Then I'd like to have an external keyboard (this could be done via network as well) to give the name of the item and the system shows you in which closet the item sits via light or using a motor-enabled-system I'd like to open the drawer automatically.

Can this be done using bifferboard or do I need an arduino-like device?

Can all this magic be handled by the USB output or do I need to mess with the GPIO thing?

Do I need to write all the code in C (or other c-like language) or there are bindings/APIs (that you know of) in Ruby?

Thanks

ps. I used the bifferboard as a small openwrt server for several software related tasks, but when it comes to hardware I'm kinda negated so please, be as pedantic as you can and/or supply links in your answers (if any).

[biff...@yahoo.co.uk]

You need an Arduino-like device. Whilst it's theoretically possible
without I suspect you'll find the Bifferboard's IO too limiting.

On Aug 3, 7:01 pm, Panagiotis Atmatzidis <p.atmatzi...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Andrew Scheller]

If you have limited hardware experience, I'd suggest you're probably
better off using the Arduino - they have a much larger
hardware-interfacing community/tutorials/etc. (and with the increased
IO pin count on the Arduino you could setup one IO per line, whereas
the BB only has 6 GPIO lines so you'd need to do some kind of
multiplexing to control 9 LEDs). You could always connect the Arduino
as a virtual serial device over USB to your Bifferboard ;)

Lurch

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[biff...@yahoo.co.uk]

On Aug 3, 9:23 pm, Andrew Scheller <ya...@loowis.durge.org> wrote:
> multiplexing to control 9 LEDs). You could always connect the Arduino
> as a virtual serial device over USB to your Bifferboard ;)

Surprisingly difficult when you consider how simple it should be in
theory. My central heating controller worked with a daemon that
connected to the serial port to talk to the Arduino. Initialising the
port was no simple matter as the power-on defaults for the virtual tty
device were really weird. I communicated with the daemon using files
that I mv'ed into position for requests, and read files back for the
response. This let me communicate with the daemon via a really simple
shell-based cgi interface and allowed me to avoid having another
binary to act as the client for the daemon. I wanted to fit all this
in 1MB flash, hence the corner-cutting. The statically linked chmon
was about 60k in size using dietlibc.

But I think if all you need is a keyboard, and no network it may not
be necessary to have the Bifferboard at all. You can use ps/2
keyboard and lcd display.

Biff.