Have you always wanted to sit at your desk and control appliances around your house? Well with the new UBW32 (pic powered) you might just be able to, a lot easily.

The UBW32 is an inexpensive, simple input/output device to connect your computer(windows,Linux & Mac) to the real world. Simply plug it into your computer’s USB port and you can send simple commands to it via a terminal. You can use this device to connect to real world things like your table lamp or that power generating reactor you have in your basement.

UBW32 Hardware Features:

* 78 usable I/O pins – all header holes on .100″ grid
* 73 usable I/O pins available along edges, allow for easy “DIP” style breadboard mounting
* miniUSB connection – supplies power and full speed USB connection to PC
* 3.3V power regulator
* 5V power regulator allows higher voltage (battery or other) power input
* Power Select switch allows selecting between USB and external power (acts as power-on switch)
* Ground, 3.3V and 5V pins available on both sides for vertical breadboard mounting
* 5 LEDS – 1 for power, 4 under software use
* 3 push buttons – 1 for reset, 2 for software use
* Minimal board size – very thin (.28″ high, 4.4″ long, 1″ wide) and 2 mounting holes
* Uses PIC32MX460F512L processor – 80MHz, 512K Flash, 32K RAM, MIPS based CPU core
* Input protection fuse allows 500mA from the power supply
* Pads on underside of board for 5V pull up resistors on all non-analog I/O pins
* External input power protected by diode
Like most USB devices, this board can be powered through the USB port and can be programmed via it too. So no need to rush our to buy that great looking programmer. The device also comes with a windows based C compiler as a plugin to MPLab.  The device features 78 I/O pins all around the perifery of the board.

The comunity has already come up with various uses and sample programs for it. So just google your way to controlling your mom/wife’s mixer with this.

Available from SparkFun for about $40. Enjoy.