Ok, so I got a bit bored at some point over Christmas and decided to play with one of my presents - a USB Rocket Launcher.

The first difficulty was getting it to run on my Linux laptop as the drivers were only for Windows. A quick search and Scott Weston sorted me out. Then I thought it should really be controlled by more than just the keyboard so I hooked it into the Thinkpad accelerometer - now movements of the laptop could direct it. Finally, as I knew Andy Stanford-Clark would be a bit disappointed in me if I hadn’t, I MQTT‘d it so that the accelerometer details are published to a broker, a bridge app subscribes to that info and (where appropriate) publishes commands which are received by a final subscriber that actually sends the commands to the rocket launcher. This way you can easily swap out the accelerometer or indeed rocket launcher for something completely different.

I feel quite pleased with myself and slightly ashamed at the same time.

Posted by gareth on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 12:43.