Sensing and Control for hobbyists and schools: Phidgets
WWW.PhidgetsUSA.com has a range of modules which connect to a host PC via USB. (There is also a www.phidgets.com (no USA), which seems to be a related site, but the one with "USA" seems to be slicker.) You need Windows 2000 or XP. The Linux community is "rolling its own", but without official support.
The simplest Phidgets, which is a name for the devices, as well as for the company, implement analog inputs, digital inputs, and digital outputs. To illustrate some shorthand, lets suppose there was a device with 2 analog inputs, 3 digital outputs and 4 digital inputs. That would be called a 2/3/4 interface.
They actually offer the following:
0/16/16 interface: $79 (Prices throughout as at 9/05)
8/ 8/ 8 interface: $79
0/ 0/ 4 interface: $47
Phidgets offer single channel and quad servo motor controllers, $25 and $60 respectively. They also have an extensive line of "bits and pieces" for robotic device makers, including pan & tilt kits and various sensors designed to work well with the input/ output boards mentioned above.
Phidgets have a neat RFID experimenter's kit. It can read only one tag at a time, and only if it is brought close to the reader, but it would be good for many things! (They sell a wide variety of tags, most at about $1.50 in small quantities.)
And finally, they also have, still via a USB interface, LCD and LED-array display modules.
I haven't (at 9/05) tried any Phidgets myself, but a quick groups.google.com check shows that the product line is several years old, with no obvious passionate critics.
If you do nothing else, and you have broadband, visit the "Projects Examples | Customer Projects", and feed the dog! You might also want to have a look at the page about the Boeing 737 simulator... built within the nose of a real 737 on someone's driveway. This man has a very Right Thinking wife!
To use the modules, you will need a Windows 2000 or XP machine... although there are some unsupported/ unofficial Linux projects out there too. Groups.google will throw up a warning to Linux users if you search on "Linux hid", but that was back in November 2003, may have been fixed by now, and not everything in newsgroups is right!
In the Windows environment, you install a library with an .msi file. That's supposed to stand for "MicroSoft Installer". Forgive a little cynicism/ experience, and please don't take this as a criticism of Phidgets... msi's are all the rage, "everybody's doing it", but... I translate "msi" two ways:
"MicroSoft for Idiots".... "They" know what they're doing, and you needn't worry your little head; they've "kindly" worked oh so hard to make your life easy. (As long as everything goes according to their plans, and as long as they've understood your system and needs.)...or
"MicroSoft Inscrutable".... Click "Next" and pray. Something will happen, but you'll never know what it was. I hope your system works afterwards.
It seems from one thing I read that all you actually NEED, if programming with Delphi, is your Delphi exe and a DLL which is installed as part of the .msi's activities.
Once the library is installed, you are mostly done. It makes writing programs to interact with the Phidgets relatively painless. There are guides for Visual Basic, C, C++, Delphi, Labview and Java programmers, and quite a few sample projects, though, apart from customer's samples, everything seems to be available only in one or another variant of Visual Basic.
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