Project Types
Our Newest Toy
Recently we have been exploring the features and capabilities of Tivo. Tivo is a consumer device used to digitally record television programs onto a hard drive. It gives you the ability to 'trick play' live TV. You can pause, rewind and Fast Forward through commercials. It also remembers what programs you watch, and looks for similar programs that it thinks you might enjoy. It then automatically records them for you. This is just a brief description of Tivo's functions.
But Tivo is based on a PPC micro running Linux. People have figured out how to 'hack' the box to do such things as adding larger hard drives, and even adding ethernet cards. Currently our Tivo is connected through a serial port to a Red Hat Linux PC. Through this setup, the Tivo is visible on our ethernet network. Tivo normally uses an internal modem to call out once per day to retrieve programming information (and occasionally, software upgrades). Our Tivo now uses our internal network and cable modem to make the daily call without using a phone line.
There is no client for this project—it's been done just for fun!
Other Projects
In 1984 - 1986 Controlsoft worked with a printing company in the mid-west to develop a program to help in estimating the cost (and therefore, the price) of printing jobs. Although, this may sound almost trivial, there are a whole plethora of factors that must be taken into account when estimating a job. In addition to the obvious, like paper type and quantity, there is the number of colors on each side, total number of sides printed, how many "up" are being printed (multiple copies per sheet, and how that affects paper usage), press washes for each color change, standard colors v.s. mixed colors, cutting, binding, boxing & delivering. Oops - almost forgot - profit! These are only a FEW of the items that must be taken into account. And if anything is left out, it can dramatically affect the cost of the job. It is not very nice to quote a job for a specific price, then find out you have miscalculated the paper quantity by a factor of 2!