Interfacing a PC to the outside world Part 1

 

I have been reading some of the Coding4Fun articles that are on MSDN.  Several of the articles are focused on connecting your computer up to external devices and writing .Net code to interface with the devices.  This has always been a main interest of mine since I am interested in robotics and home automation.  The resent release of .Net 2.0 has made some nice features available for doing serial communications.  Also Microsoft has made the Visual Studio Express editions freely available for 1 year.  This makes up a great solution for the general hobbyist to play with software and hardware.  So I thought it was time that I start my own set of articles on building software and integrating it to hardware devices.

 

So I gave it some thought on where to begin.  What project will be a prime candidate?  How would I build the foundation so I could leverage different hardware solutions to a given interface problem.  So I decided on a few goals to keep in mind about the project:

• Provide a solution to an interfacing problem that could be used in many projects.
• Build the library using .Net 2.0.
• The library should extract the consumer from any hardware implementation.
• The library should be testable without hardware implementation. 
• The library can use external pluggable components to fulfill the interface to the hardware itself.  So 3rd party components can be built and plugged into the library.

 

Stay tuned for a series of articles on this project