Greetings and salutations.
I am a senior at DeVry University, in their EET program. I, as part of a team of three, have a project to complete which will require us to control several pager motors with a laptop computer. This is a design project, not an assigned project. That is, the team decided what the project would be, the assignment was to come up with a device that shows our skills and build it before graduation... so any help will be fair game.
The motors will not just be on/off, they will be sent a four-bit value which will then be fed to a DAC, and the resulting voltage will run the motor. The idea is to have a range of vibration intensities/frequencies for each motor.
The laptop to be used has one free USB port, (the second USB port will have a camera attached to it,) an unused PCMCIA slot, and its docking port available to me for this communication.
We've pretty much decided that the best choice to control these motors would be through the docking port, via an interface board that we will build. The interface board will essentially be a bunch of latches and a D/A converter multiplexed to the motors. The DAC will poll each latch, convert the four bit value it is holding to a voltage, and charge a cap with that voltage. Alternately, we may just use an R2R network for each motor instead of a DAC and do away with the multiplexing. My task is to get the four-bit values into the latches.
My difficulty is that I know very little about the docking1 port, and a few quick searches using google did not turn up any information sources. Could anyone point me to a website that will give pinouts, and maybe some information about programming for devices that use the port?
Is this port simply straight access to the system busses? (like the slots on a desktop computer's motherboard) If so, the only information I would lack would be the pinout. If it requires a special software routine like a USB port does, on the other hand, I would need a rundown on that routine as well. Also, sources for the connector would help me out, although I'm sure with more searching I could probably find that at an online store. :)
If any of you disagree that the docking port would be the best choice for controlling the motors, I'd like to know that too, and what you think the best choice in that case would be.
Thanks in advance for any responses.