home made media tablet with arduino

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Interfacing
1

I am going to buy a digital photo frame and , as i have done succsfuly before run DSL linux on it and use it as a media tablet , last time i never changed anything but the firmware of the photo frame , but htis time i want a whole new cnc milled plastic case with an arduino automating some button presses.

I have JUST ABOUT got to grips with progarmming servos which i9s mainly what i bought my arduino for but i need to know how to program in a:

program start,
if pin 5 goes high
setpin3 high
setpin6 high
wait 10 seconds
setpin1 high

so ill have a button hoocked up to pin 5 and pins 3,6 and 5 firing relays to "push" the button.

This wasnt so hard but i cant find anyway to get about 4 copies of this code running at once all with different input buttons performing different functions , also whilst all of this is going on i need to run another program which monitor a thermossitor and switches on 2 fans when it gets bove a certain point , could i do this in a loop or cna i run them seperately.

by lop i mena cna i have it looping round looking for a high buton a couple of times a second and when it finds one doing the code above

2

This wasnt so hard but i cant find anyway to get about 4 copies of this code running at once

The Arduino does not have multi-threading or multi-tasking, so you'll have to write your code so that it polls all four buttons, one after another and then sets or clears the output bits accordingly. You won't notice that the code is polling the buttons sequentially, of course, because it'll do it fast enough to appear instantaneous. The only slightly tricky part might be the 10 second delay, which will have to be done by polling a timer while, at the same time, polling the other three switches.

3

As a side subject, do you have any details of your previous media tablet? Sounds interesting!

4

it wasnt really A media tablet , i just run linuxon a photo frame to see if it was possible , im going of to argos later to buy the next digital victim , but thius time im building a media tablet out of it . Here are the specs i pciekd up in the lkast projhect.

33MHZ proccesor (embedded only)
open vms operating system
128 mb of ram
10 mb of rom
8 mb of nand flash (for pictures)
some weird bios that is capable of botting of the sd card but it has to be an unmounted .img image
can run mandriva embedded in a its very basic form and it can run xanox