liquid crystal display

Your standard LCD may be svelte compared with the old tube set, but at about four inches thick, it hardly hangs flat like a picture frame. For that, you need Hitachi's new Ultra Slim TV, redesigned to a negligible 1.5 inches thick but up to 42 inches diagonally. In principle, Ultra Slim models work the same as standard LCDs: Fluorescent tubes illuminate a liquid-crystal display from behind.

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Now that youve learned how to program your Create (see Lesson 1) and wirelessly communicate with your Create (see Lesson 2), its time to explore the iRobot Command Module expansion ports—and expand your create. Armed with four ports, dubbed ePorts, the Command Module provides unprecedented access to the I/O pins of its onboard Atmel ATmega 168 AVR microcontroller.

The only trouble is how can you tap into these I/O pins?

While the jury is still out on the iRobot Command Module Breakout Board (#4818; suggested retail should be $5.99), Element Products sells the eProto board which can plug into any of the four Command Module ePorts. Priced at $4.95, eProto is supplied as a two-part kit: DB-9 male plug and a sweet 1 3/16 x 1 1/4-inch PCB. Whats so sweet about a PCB without any components? Plenty, you can add your own.

Assembly is easy enough—just solder the supplied DB-9 plug to the underside of the PCB. Done. Hey, time yourself; you just assembled an electronic kit is less than 5 minutes.

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Call it the smart communicator. In a few years, the functions in today’s personal digital assistant (PDA)—notebook, to-do list, calendar, contacts—will be the least of it. Thanks to a variant of Moore’s Law that says data-storage density doubles every 18 months, tomorrow’s smart communicator will hold 250GB—enough to store 55 movies.

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