Led Controller: Digg The Digg Button

I was looking for some side projects when I ran across an ad on craigslist. The name sounded familiar, but I could not place it at first. Little did I realize that it was David Randolph of Systm and Revision3 fame.

Anyway, the project was to create a small program that would monitor a particular story on digg.com. It would count the number of “diggs” and send that information to an LED controller. It is probably helpful to view the episode that explains a bit more about the project.

As far as the software is concerned, it was programmed in Visual Basic .NET. As I wanted to to release this software for educational purposes, it has a lot more comments than I would normally use. It also is probably more robust than I would make it. The software demonstrates several coding techniques:

• XML comments

• Reading and saving settings to/from disk

• COM port communications

• Minimizing to an icon in the system tray

• Timers

• RegEx (Regular Expressions)

Feel free to download the software (below) and don’t hesitate to ask questions.