Manuel Bouyer wrote:

> On Wed, May 21, 2003 at 09:11:13PM +0300, Jukka Marin wrote:
> > On Wed, May 21, 2003 at 08:05:13PM +0200, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> > > I'm planning on building a 8-port power supply switch controlled by RS232.
> > > Has someone some schematics for this ? Or just some chips refenrences
> > > for UART would be a start.
> > > I guess I need a UART which presents the data on a 8 output pins.
> > > A bidirectionnal UART would be nice, so that the state of the switches can be
> > > reported back to the host (in case it reboots, etc ...)
> > 
> > You could do this with something like a PIC microcontroller (PIC16F628,
> > for example).  It has one UART and up to 14 I/O pins.
> 
> Yes, someone at work suggested this too.
> The problem is that this has to be programmed. We have the equipement at work,
> but I plan to make the shematics available on web, and would like to
> avoid PICs so that it could be build with minimal equipements.

I saw http://www.ar.com.au/~softmark/page27.html the other day.  It's
USB and not serial, and I haven't looked any further, but it does look
interesting at first glance.

Simon.
--
Simon Burge                            <simonb@wasabisystems.com>