xAP to C-Bus production hardware IT WORKS

[Kevin Hawkins]

I now have my 'final versions' of the MKII C-Bus to xAP boards back from
the
manufacturers and I have powered a couple up and they work !! I will be
posting a picture soon so you can see what they look like. Although I say
so
myself they are very professional and look like any other volume produced
product. This is a significantly more feature capable board than the
previous MK1 - more details on that too shortly. This will be the same
hardware controller that can connect HomeVision units to C-Bus, just
different firmware.

The newer board uses a different Rabbit core (the 3700) to the previous
design and I still have some firmware tweaks to do that will complete the
hardware I/O re-assignment and also change the Ethernet downloader code a
bit. This is now a very capable board with 4 serial ports, parallel I/O and
Ethernet plus 512K SRAM, 512K Flash and 1MB of serial flash memory. The
board also supports RS422/RS485 and (optionally) true optical isolation.
There is an inbuilt web server and ftp server too. There are a couple more
hardware features there too for 'the future'. Of course these extra
features need firmware support too, currently all that I have commited to
is
the C-Bus to xAP gateway and I've said that I am looking at HV/C-Bus.

Casewise it fits too :-) I still have the task of milling the end panel
cutouts - if anyone knows a good place to get this done (at low cost /low
volume) let me know - otherwise it's going to be done by hand for the first
few at least. I shall be showing these units at UKHA2004.

Now - an offer - I only supplied a handful of the MK1 units and as a reward
to those early adopters I am very happy to give you full credit of the
price
you paid - against a MK11 unit.

I will post more details & the final price for the MK11 units
shortly.



Kevin