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This is a very easy and fun to build project that will allow you to control up to eight external devices through your computer's parallel port. You may for instance control different appliances such as lamps, computers, printers, tv sets, radios, music systems, air conditioners, air fans, garden sprinklers and anything else you can think of, all through your computer.

Stepper motor driver that will allow you to precisely control a unipolar stepper motor through your computer's parallel port. With a stepper motor you can build a lot of interesting gadgets such as robots, elevator, PCB drilling mill, camera panning system, automatic fish feeder, etc. If you have never worked with stepper motors before you will surely have a lot of fun with this project.

High fidelity external USB Soundcard / USB Headphones project that can be built for your PC or Mac. It is based on the latest PCM2706 IC which functions as a high quality, crystal clear 16-BIT Stereo DAC. It is a single chip digital-to-analog converter that offers two D/A output stereo channels, digital S/PDIF output and requires very few external components. PCM2706 includes integrated USB 1.0 & USB 2.0 compliant interface controller and it is conveniently powered directly from USB connection. PCM2706 is a USB plug-and-play device and does not require any driver installation under Windows XP and Mac OSX.

With this project you can show the temperature on you PC. This thermometer plugs on any free serial port. It gives temperature readings accurate to 0.5°C with no calibration.The project consists of the AVR 2313 Project board and the DS1621 Thermometer board and software for the PC.

Each fan turns off when the temperature drops 5 degrees below its turn-on temperature. For example, if the dial is set to 80 degrees, the fan turns on at 80 degrees and turns off at 75 degrees. This prevents the fan from cycling on and off rapidly, which would occur if the fan turned on at 80, started to cool the cabinet, and then immediately turned off at 79.

PC LED Load is a device and software designed to display many shades of colors from green to red on your computer case LED. Colors are controlled completely by software and can be updated in real-time. The PC LED Load circuit board is connected to one of the internal USB ports found on most newer motherboards. The only actual case modification required is in replacing the two (or more) front panel LEDs with tri-color versions. These are then connected to the PC LED Load circuit board.

This project's purpose is to design a fully automated machine for drilling a printed circuit board, (PCB) blank at a minimum cost and with the minimum amount of custom machining. This low cost philosophy is achieved by adapting the existing mechanical assemblies from readily available computer peripherals and electronic measuring instruments. Drill data is transferred to the PCDrill from an Excellon drill file generated by a PCB CAD program running on a personal computer.

A few time ago I decided to create a media center box to replace my DVD player, satellite receiver, VCR and my kid's Play Station 2, to one device. So, I made a core 2 duo processor system that actually replaced with succeed, all my electronic devices. The only thing that was missing was a remote control to switch On/Off my Media Center. After I searched on the net to buy a complete remote control system, I saw that the price was a little bit high (about 90 euros). I checked my stuff to find my old 7-in-one remote control that I had bought 2 years ago and I started to build my own remote control receiver circuit.

RS232 ports of modern laptops are not always complying with the original RS232 standard. If RS232 levels are expected to be +/- 12 volts, most of the time laptops RS232 ports produce in fact +/- 5 volts levels. For most peripherals, this is not an issue and they are responding as expected.

This article shows how to use the PIC16F84 microcontroller with PicBasic to design a quick & effective, serially controlled, I/O-Expander. Using PicBasic makes developing handy single-chip devices like this extremely simple.