coltTaylor
Newbie level 1
First of all, thank you all for tolerating an illiterate in your midst.
I have no training in electronics or electrical engineering and am therefore present here to tap your wisdom with little but gratitude to give back in return.
In keeping with the forum's policies, I won't be posting thank you afterwards, so thanks in advance for your assistance.
What I would like to know is...
Given any consumer electronics device with a 1-line numeric LCD output (a light meter for example) , how difficult would it be to tap into that LCD and feed it's information out through a USB cable instead?
I will be monitoring the resulting usb feed as an HID (human interface device, like a mouse) via a computer. I am a programmer and I know how to do the monitoring part.
What I am hoping for is that there is a "usb module" out there somewhere with inputs similar to those of a digital LCD module.
I am also hoping that such a module would sample the formerly LED output several times per second.
This question actually guards the door to most of my latest entrepeneurial ideas.
Everytime I see a device with an LCD readout, I start thinking about what I could do with its information if I could just get it streaming into a computer.
I've come across dozens of devices that could provide very interesting computer applications.
So, my hope is that getting the devices to talk USB will not be rocket science.
Thank you again for sharing your wisdom.
Sincerely,
Boy am I glad that I described myself as electronically illiterate. In the original version of this post, I described the display on my hypothetical consumer devices an LED (which apparently a very old fashion numeric display and/or a modern flashlight). The actual display technology that I am thinking about is called (I hope) an LCD. Rather than prove myself a further fool by relying on my latest (probably inadequate) understanding, let me reference just about every digital-scale, light-meter, range-finding-binoculars, or caller-id-box manufactured in the last ten years. If you can imagine any consumer device with a single line of dark-gray on pale-gray text (usually numeric) and showing from 3-10 characters either with or without a decimal point, you are probably thinking about the kind of display I want to funnel into a usb port. Are they standardized? I don't know, but it would make my task easier if they were. Thanks again for your patience and wisdom!
Colt Taylor
I have no training in electronics or electrical engineering and am therefore present here to tap your wisdom with little but gratitude to give back in return.
In keeping with the forum's policies, I won't be posting thank you afterwards, so thanks in advance for your assistance.
What I would like to know is...
Given any consumer electronics device with a 1-line numeric LCD output (a light meter for example) , how difficult would it be to tap into that LCD and feed it's information out through a USB cable instead?
I will be monitoring the resulting usb feed as an HID (human interface device, like a mouse) via a computer. I am a programmer and I know how to do the monitoring part.
What I am hoping for is that there is a "usb module" out there somewhere with inputs similar to those of a digital LCD module.
I am also hoping that such a module would sample the formerly LED output several times per second.
This question actually guards the door to most of my latest entrepeneurial ideas.
Everytime I see a device with an LCD readout, I start thinking about what I could do with its information if I could just get it streaming into a computer.
I've come across dozens of devices that could provide very interesting computer applications.
So, my hope is that getting the devices to talk USB will not be rocket science.
Thank you again for sharing your wisdom.
Sincerely,
Boy am I glad that I described myself as electronically illiterate. In the original version of this post, I described the display on my hypothetical consumer devices an LED (which apparently a very old fashion numeric display and/or a modern flashlight). The actual display technology that I am thinking about is called (I hope) an LCD. Rather than prove myself a further fool by relying on my latest (probably inadequate) understanding, let me reference just about every digital-scale, light-meter, range-finding-binoculars, or caller-id-box manufactured in the last ten years. If you can imagine any consumer device with a single line of dark-gray on pale-gray text (usually numeric) and showing from 3-10 characters either with or without a decimal point, you are probably thinking about the kind of display I want to funnel into a usb port. Are they standardized? I don't know, but it would make my task easier if they were. Thanks again for your patience and wisdom!
Colt Taylor