Re: Errors fixed

You might want to amend the instructions a bit while you're at it. The large stand-up elecrolytics should go on last so they don't take a beating while the board is being flipped over and over during construction. Also a fin on the heatsink rubs up against one of the electrolytics so you should make a note to get the electrolytic as far from the heatsink as possible.

I'm not a big fan of those clip-on heatsinks. They're ok for something that isn't going to get moved around a lot, but it's been my experience in small electronics that sooner or later the device gets dropped hard enough to jar them loose and then you have a large piece of conductive metal floating around inside. Not sure this is a problem in the slinke because there may not be room in the case for the heatsink to come off...

Overall, a nice little project. Took me about an hour to assemble and fired up perfectly the first time. I noticed the parts descrepancies but they were easy to sort out and I figured you just hadn't finished updating the docs. I know how crazy things get when you try to bring a project like this together .

My quadriplegic roommate is no end of thrilled because he can now control his TV & stereo from the computer, using speech recognition. I've just started tearing apart an old portable phone to see if I can do the dialing via the slinke's parallel port. Eventually we'll mount a laptop & the slinke on his wheelchair and he can control X10 devices throughout the house.

My own wishlist for the future:

- ActiveX functions to read and play back the bare, RLL data from a remote.

- For your next hardware upgrade, 8 extra bits of I/O. I noticed lots of unused real estate on the PCB. It would be sufficient just to include the extra circuitry and let people add their own parts if they want more I/O.