by Re: Hooking up Mac to Aquarium / Data Acquisition
I've looked into this recently, and what I did was buy a very inexpensive
board from HyperTROL (in Boulder CO) which hooks up via the serial port.
The board has an 8 bit microcontroller (8052 I think) which you program in
basic via the serial port. The board will run standalone and is easy to
interface with via Hypercard (calls to the serial port). Right now mine is
being used as a fancy timer for a hydroponics setup. The board is only $100.
Other cards are available for general D->A or A->D conversion. They are a
bit more expensive and I'll probably build my own. If you're willing to muck
around with hardware a bit but don't want to have to design everything, this
is probably a good way to go.
-tod