Ken Hornstein wrote:
> Howdy all,
> 
> I'm looking for a relatively inexpensive box/card/USB dongle/serial
> port thing that has a few digital output lines and at least one A/D
> converter.  I need at least three digital outputs and only one analog
> input.  I know I could build such a thing using any number of
> microcontrollers, but I would rather buy something at this stage.  My
> idea was to hang this off of a Soekis box (running NetBSD of couse)
> which restricts things to USB or serial, but if there was something
> that was relatively cheap available in an ISA or PCI form I'd be
> willing to reconsider (I know the Soekris has digital I/O pins
> available, but I didn't see one that had any form of A/D on them).  I'm
> okay with writing a device driver for said device if that's what it
> takes, as long as some form of documentation is available.
> 
> If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.  Thanks!
> 
> --Ken
> 

Several ideas from my TODO list:

Digital I/O on the NET4801 was added recently:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/current-users/2005/09/27/0016.html
Adding I2C to this should be nearly trivial.

http://www.ftdichip.com/
Demo boards from http://www.dlpdesign.com/
Newer chips have support for parallel, UART, and user-defined synchronous
serial protocols.  Some of the demo boards have a picMicro processor which
could be used for A2D.  Linux driver source is available, I don't think I
ever able to found any complete protocol documentation.

http://www.phidgets.com/
Claims to be open source friendly.  Source includes Linux and Mac OS-X
driver support.  Looks like its "libusb" is the portable layer.  The
Linux version compiles under NetBSD, but only because they've included
several Linux OS header files...

-Neil