Helvetica 'Foofers' Bold - Follow-Up to Prior Geekery

02:51 am - Follow-Up to Prior Geekery

Okay, figured out how to access those lines without needing a second screen to be attached. The code needs a lot of cleanup, but basically works. This means I only need one side of the DVI cable as originally planned. Small is good. If I wanted to be exceedingly anal-retentive…I could dissect and do the same to the Mini-DVI adapter directly, so just a tiny little nubbin would be required to interface with the servo controller!

If one’s computer has a full-size DVI port, all that’s required then is the DVI cable ($4.56 from monoprice.com)…but since it’s cut in half, that’s actually enough for two interface cables. So going in with a friend, it’s a mere $2.28 for such an interface! For us poor sods with only a Mini-DVI port, I found the Dynex Mini-DVI to DVI adapter at Best Buy for $16.99. This can be used as-is with the half DVI cable, or cut apart as previously mentioned for maximum smallness. Unfortunately I don’t know of a source for just the Mini-DVI plugs, else I’d be buying a crapload of them right now.

The HDMI breakout cable should hopefully arrive tomorrow, so I’ll be able to try this out on the Apple TV as well.

One slight downside to this implementation is that the resulting I2C bus is “single master,” meaning the computer can poll devices for their state, but there’s no means for the computer to respond to events that originate elsewhere on the bus (“multi master”). A lot of systems work in this manner anyway, so it’s not necessarily a huge downside, just mentioning it to avoid any impression of this being a be-all, do-all I2C interface for all occasions. For things like sensors and servos, it’ll work fine.