Hey everyone!

If there's enough interest, I'd like to establish a microcontroller workshop/class/night, what have you, to putz around with IC's. I have some experience with the Arduino, basic stamps, and PIC's (c and asm). I also have the parts and means to fiddle with ARM's, Atmega's, and FPGA's along with a myriad of sensors and other components to share with y'all to advance our knowledge and fun. The question I have for you is: what do you want to do?

I really want to learn fpga's and have quite a few ideas ranging from adaptive computer coprocessing and des cracking to digital signal processing and electronics workbench replacement(oscilloscope, spec. analyzer, logic analyzer, sig. generator, etc.) In one.

So, what do you want to bring to the table?

I don't have many specifics to bring to the table, but I'm in all over this.

At one point I wanted to build out my own apartment sized automation system.

I'm sure getting back into discussions with people will get my mind working again.

Skyler

I've actually done some home automation stuff and have been wanting to do more such as automating and reporting hvac and water heater functions and releasing it as an open source soft- and hard- ware project but I'm hung up on a cheap communications implementation atm.

This might be of interest. I was looking at this when we were going to rebuild our house and try and implement a bunch of "green house" improvements, which mean lots of things to lots of people, so that's a long story.

Any way, this is an interesting monitoring system, less so control, makes a lot of use of i2c.
http://www.welserver.com/

Mr house is an interesting and long running software control project. It started as x10, but I think has other com methods now.
http://misterhouse.sourceforge.net/

I did this for a living for awhile, mostly in a museum, but I can tell you what was cool, oh ten years or so ago.

Pete