Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr>  wrote:
 > > > > 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.
 > 
 > They have others USB applications, which looks interesting as well.
 > But, my switch has to be driven by a sparc IPC, so USB isn't an option here :)

You will have more fun doing it with an AVR. They have flash based
codestore instead of the PIC EPROM based codestore (or OTP) so you
don't have to wait through 45 minutes of UV erase time between 
code iterations... You can program an AVR using a parallel port
interface and any number of MS-DOS utilities available in the 
satellite hacking community...

Heck, if you have an old ISA Weasel, there's an Atmel AT90s4433 on
it that you can program through the serial port using S-records, and
it has 2 keyboard connectors worth of I/O ports available to you
to hack up.  

This will also give you  the impetus to port the FreeBSD ppi 
driver so we can reasonably do embedded controller work on NetBSD.