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In high school, I made a Jarvis like voice automation system with a friend. This was 2010, before Siri and AWS and home automation were cool. The whole system w
by occamschainsaw 6y ago
In high school, I made a Jarvis like voice automation system with a friend. This was 2010, before Siri and AWS and home automation were cool. The whole system was made out of junk parts. An ancient desktop with a parallel port was the brain. The parallel port pins were connected to relays which were driving the mains current to various appliances. We used the hilariously bad Windows speech recognition to manipulate some cmd scripts which turned the parallel pins on and off. As stupid teenagers, we had open mains lines on the floor. I am happy to be alive.
- alibarber 6y agoMy 'lightbulb' (pun intended) moment as a kid for getting in to CS was when my dad fished an old (something - it ran DOS, but not windows, and came with the Turbo C Bible) PC out of the skip at work and wired up some 12V filament bulbs to the parallel port - and by writing bytes out to it you could make them flash in pretty patterns. Later I also did the mains relay thing too - but I put them in a metal box. Safety first ;)
- tomjen3 6y agoYou would probably have been fine. I was doing much less cool stuff when I ran main voltage (240v) directly into the palm of my left hand. Thumb twitched for about an hour :)