[Jukebox-list] black 3w1 wallbox

[Steve Wahl]

Matt,

I never saw the guy who was working on this idea post that he got it
working.

In theory, if you're writing your own device drivers, you could do
this with very little (no?) hardware and a serial port, wiring the
pulse output to one of the modem inputs on a serial port, and taking
an interrupt each time a pulse came in; timing when the pulses occur,
and a final timer interrupt going off after the last pulse from the
wallbox.  The interrupt rate would be around 20 pulses per second (one
for each make and one for each break of the contacts in the wallbox),
so a modern cpu could handle it, assuming the interrupt latency on the
computer isn't such that you'd miss pulses, or would be unable to
determine the length of time between pulses accurately enough to tell
where one pulse train stops and the next starts...

[ I have the experience to do something like this under Linux.  If you
want to give me a known working wallbox, that I'd keep at the end, and
some $, and a couple of months time, I'd probably be willing to do it
in my spare time.  But I'm assuming you wouldn't want to invest that
much into it, and probably wouldn't want to run linux, anyway...  But
you do mention ogg, so maybe.]

If you're not writing your own device driver, there aren't any ports
on a PC that were really designed to accept the sort of signalling a
wallbox sends.  Most people would approach this with a PIC or similar
microcontroller, converting the pulses to standard rs-232 async serial
characters and connecting to a serial port -- or maybe one of those
newfangled microcontrollers with a built in usb port, which I have no
experience with.

--> Steve Wahl


On Mon, Aug 13, 2007 at 11:44:29AM -0400, Matthew Cyr wrote:
> Hi, I realize this is a very old thread and I am sorry for bumping it.
> I have been looking for the last year or so on some way to interface my 3W1 to my PC for mp3/ogg playback.
> I have built a transformer for the wallbox so it is powered and seems to function nicely.
> Software is also not a problem as I have written some linux bash scripts that should take care of that.
> The only piece I'm missing is how to read the pulses from the wallbox on the pc's serial port.
> I was wondering if you ever found a solution to this? If so I would be most grateful if you could share how you did this.
> 
> Thanks for your time,
> Matt
> 
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-- 
Steve Wahl    steve at pro-ns.net

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