Most awful hack job REDUX

Well, don't neglect the rest of his physics and mathematics education, while making up edjamacaishunnal toys. Do stuff with weights and levers and pulleys and water and friction and motion and stuff.

Play ball with him. That teaches a surprising amount of physics.

Don't forget, "Play" is kids' most important function - it's preliminary to all of education.

Good Luck! Rich [prerequisite?]

Just to offer a mellowing of my tirade in my other response here:

The point is, not to quit trying stuff, and exploring, and doing new stuff - - But why do the same damn stuff that's been done thousands of times over before? That's what books and stuff are for

You don't have to discover everything about reality anew - you _can_ use other pepooles' reports of their experiences for references. Good Lcuck! Riuch

I will talk about linux since I have no interest in microsoft windows.

There are probably drivers in the linux OS that treat RS-232 as a file descriptor. That is, high level applications could open /dev/serial or some such (my vague recollections) and then use system calls like read, write and fcntl to drive the serial port.

So, if I can get some circuit that could talk to RS-232 in its native form, then writing a linux app that would talk to RS-232, is just an exercise in programming.

I am not into low level programming and such, however I could do it.

chgrp lusers /dev/serial chmod 660 /dev/serial

The OS would translate system calls on /dev/serial into byte outputs.

Sorry, I cannot do without internet access.

Perhaps you misunderstand what I want.

I am not really looking for doing months of labor just for the sake of doing cute stuff.

The TIG inverter project, for example, is done so that I can weld aluminum. (even though, at this point, I realize that I already spent an ungodly amount of time and will rarely, if ever, need to weld aluminum). But at least there was some external justification, I thought, how about making a $7,000 AC welder for the price of $9.99 for the DC welder and some power electronics to convert it to AC.

Same is with these relays. If I can find a manufactured solution that can let me control relays via RS-232 or some such, I would gladly pay, say, $50 for it. $100 if it also provides digitized feedback.

Then I would use it to make toys and perhaps home automation or welding automation, etc.

According to Rich Grise :

Your program only controls the output signals from the controller which are fed to the relays controlling the lamps. It is still possible for a solid-state relay to short, or a relay contact to weld, so there is a benefit to be had from extra hardware to monitor the actual power to the lamps, and to switch onto blinking red mode if such a condition occurs.

Probably an interesting thing to watch -- but then there is the time lost testifying to the police and later the court case (if any).

Enjoy, DoN.

You may wish to bookmark this link....

"The importance of morality is that people behave themselves even if nobody's watching. There are not enough cops and laws to replace personal morality as a means to produce a civilized society. Indeed, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Unfortunately, too many of us see police, laws and the criminal justice system as society's first line of defense." --Walter Williams

Thanks Gunner. I browsd the site a little bit and did not find the application that I was looking for, but I will look some more.

Gee, one little comment, and I lit off a firestorm... (Hee!) ;-)

Yes, they have a separate safety circuit that looks for troubles, and has a way to hit the master override of the regular controller, usually by dropping out a power relay that kills the controller power and throws it into all-ways flashing red.

(Disclaimer: IANA Signal Mechanic. Sounds like Don /is/.)

Aside from the internal controller problems that Don mentions, it will also trip off on a wiring fault outside the controller box. A cross in the underground wiring between any of the power output lines, or a deliberate (vandalism or stupidity) mis-wiring of the system like that in a handhole or at a post base could create a hazard - like the Yellow from one side shorting to the Green of another. Even if there was a solid red and solid yellow displayed at the same time, that still might prompt a fool to go into the intersection.

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you can also do ioctl() calls on the opened serial port to access the port pins directly, and I think it's possiblle to set it up so you can use use select() to wait for a status change, (if you just want to use it general purpose I/O instead of as async serial)

Nope. I once designed traffic controllers, but I wouldn't touch an operating controller at an intersection. That work is best done by signal technicians that know what the hell they're doing!