Might I interest you in vinyl siding?

Working at home you get lots of sales calls. It's pretty clear which ones are since they never get names or even gender right. But, hey, they have a job to do too.

Which led me to a new product idea: on-demand reverse billing. It's quite simple, at any point during a phone call you dial **5 and the party on the other end is billed by the minute to talk to you. Want to tell me about your new credit card? a minute, minimum charge , go ahead.

The phone company should love it since they would get a percentage. The calling party *might* love it because they have a captive audience and, presumably, that's all they need in order to make the pitch.

Here's how it should work: dial ** and the per minute fee. **5 for /min, **9 for /min, etc.. After you dial the fee a message informs the caller of the rate and allows them to hang up. You probably don't want to dial it too high or the other end will immediately hang up. Too low and you're missing out on valuable income. This might even be useful for consultants and phone support.

• info
  • comment?
  • permanent link
  • email this

BTW, here's a list of 232 things folks have created with Basic Stamps.
Including...

=====================================================================
 Title : RIMS controller for beer making                     [# 032]
=====================================================================
 Date  : 980301
 Author: C.D. Pritchard
--------------------------------------------------------------------- 
 Stamp model   : BS2-IC Module
 Code available: YES
 Filename      : rims_ok.bs2 and r_mem.bs2
 URL           : http://chattanooga.net/~cdp/rims_inf.htm
---------------------------------------------------------------------
 Description   :
  
 For homebrewers. Controls mash temperature on a recirculation 
 infusion mash system (RIMS) and also controls the sparge water tank
 temperature. Uses thermistors to monitor temps- 2 on the RIMS and 1 
 in sparge water tank. Controls AC power supply to two 1500W heaters
 via optoisolators/ zero-crossing driven triacs. Setpoints are entered
 via keypad. Elapsed times, temperatures, setpoints and heater statuses
 are displayed on a 2x16 LCD. Sends data via RS232 to a PC for logging
 and analysis.

• info
  • comment?
  • permanent link
  • email this

A month back I posted a link to Siteplayer, an ethernet webserver on a chip. I bought one with the developers board and even with that extra hardware the rig is smaller than a deck of cards. Pretty cool. Siteplayer is run by Jack Schoof, the same fellow who brought us Lantastic all those years ago. There's a pretty active message group and Mr. Schoof posted a note the other day outlining Siteplayer's near term goals:

1. New version of SitePlayer firmware with Passwords. Also with initialization for port pins at reset time. Some other minor additions.

2. Version of SitePlayer with our BasicX operating system in it. See www.basicx.com for more information on the BasicX devices.
   

   My goal is to have this fully functional as a BasicX processor and at the same time have the web server as a monkey on BasicX's back. This means that code that is written in this embedded Basic will have a direct (and CODELESS) connection to the web server. For example if you do a statement like: j=j+1 in basic and if j was an object in the web server, then the value would immediately change on the web site as the Basic statement was executed. This is a codeless way to display data and it amazingly powerful. The hard part for me is that I am writing the entire operating system and code execution engine again for BasicX in 8051 assembly and at the same time allowing a complete independent operating system (web server) to run at the same time in the same space. All within 16K of code space for both operating systems and all with 256 bytes of RAM - WHEW!

3. Telnet version of SitePlayer. A completely different operating system dedicated to just COM port to TCP/IP and back again.

4. Large Memory Version(s) of SitePlayer. I would like to get a version of SitePlayer that has a minimum of 16 megabytes of flash for web page space. This may be in the form of a flash chip or a socket for SmartMedia.

• info
  • comment?
  • permanent link
  • email this

Here's something cool to hook to a Siteplayer or use on its own. Parallax, the makers of the Basic Stamp is coming out with an object oriented Java Stamp controller.

Parallax has some other cool things on their site, including robotics. Speaking of robotics, last year around this time I went to Florida to catch the FIRST robotics finals. What a trip. I caught the tail end of this year's event on NASA TV with Dean Kamen, Jeff Bezos, and John Doerr rolling around on Segways. Seen in that context the Segway really looked like an electric wheel chair for people who can't sit.

• info
  • comment?
  • permanent link
  • email this