Work in progress!!!
You can do a lot of stuff with Kettle: ETL, EAI and much more and you can even connect Kettle to hardware devices to measure or control external things.
For example reading of RFID tags are possible and already in production: Intelligent InSites Integrates Pentaho to Help Hospitals Improve Efficiencies with RFID tags
Here is a prove-of-concept described, to control a model train by Kettle via USB and a hardware controller (K8055).
The K8055 board has 5 digital inputs, 8 digital outputs, 2 analog inputs and 2 analog outputs. It is available as a construction kit or already assembled.
Short history
This project was started back in December 2010 to control a model train just for fun. The working prove-of-concept can be found on my blog and it was first demonstrated at the Pentaho community event September 2011 in Frascati.
The real challenge was to find a suitable Java driver since the original K8055 SDK delivers only Windows DLLs. There are a couple of projects that I tested, so here is a part of my journey:
- TWUsb2.4 – It worked well, but it was in my opinion too overloaded with functionality that is not needed, has only German documentation and is only for Windows via DLLs.
- J-K8055-Wrapper – This one has only German doc and is also only for Windows via DLLs. Since this was almost what I looked for since it covers just what it needs, I planned to work on this project and improve and translate the doc. But I stopped this idea, because after more investigation a couple of months later, I finally found this:
- K8055-x64-java – this works via the native Java USB (libUSB) and for the non Windows platforms,you can use the Library K8055 for Linux
How to
- Download libUSB
- Download k8055-x64-java for Windows 64 bit or Library k8055 for Linux