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interesting component..maybe some uses for arcade builders...

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ahofle:


--- Quote from: Neverending Project on July 31, 2008, 01:57:08 pm ---Funny you should mention that...
Link

This is a kit for a bicycle wheel spoke, but there are certainly different kits out there...

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Now that is cool.  I wonder how visible it is during the day?  I never ride at night.

ChadTower:


--- Quote from: ahofle on July 31, 2008, 03:37:18 pm ---Now that is cool.  I wonder how visible it is during the day?  I never ride at night.

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My road bike is matte black... so I definitely try to stay off the road at night. 



SavannahLion:


--- Quote from: ChadTower on July 31, 2008, 01:37:00 pm ---
That doesn't really rule out the possibility.  A USB device tends to mount as a drive, yes?  If you look at the picture of the client it appears to be writing whatever format it uses out to a file called usbled.txt (in this instance, anyway).  If you were able to reverse engineer that format you could create those files yourself with a PERL script.  PERL is perfect for that - it is at its heart an Extraction and Reporting Language.  All that would be left then would be to find a way to dump that onto the controller from the command line.  If anything in this process is going to be the showstopper, that would be it, but I bet it could be done one way or another in the same PERL script. 

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Perlmonk, I'm not saying software is going to be a problem. What I'm saying is that the programming on the fly needs to overcome an engineering obsticle. The cable looks like it's got three pins, so my (other) guess would be that programming is done through the three wire power cable for the fan. In which case, one would probably have to build an additional circuit that would switch between feeding power to the fan and programming the fan. Or, possibly even drawing power from the USB bus to power the fan? Did you notice that the reviewer stated:


--- Quote ---Inside you have the fan, screws and power wire. Besides that standard affair, there's a USB stick, data transfer wire, and an installation CD. To program the unit, you hook the data transfer wire between the fan and the USB stick.

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and


--- Quote ---The only problem I had was it wouldn't let me 'Preview' or 'Demo All'. But no fear, I just burnt the info to the fan. Once removing the data cable, the fan was plugged in and everything worked out just fine.

--- End quote ---

The way the GUI is laid out, it looks like Preview/Demo All is some sort of fan emulation rather than running the fan itself.



ChadTower:


We're talking about different aspects of the same project, of course.

SavannahLion:

That's kind of my point. If you can't overcome the potential engineering hump, trying to tackle the software side is just going to be a dead end.

But yes, Perl would be what I would use to attack this too. Opens it up for alternate OSes. :)

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