roZetta lives!

[nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Houston)]

roZetta has been on life-support for a while but ZBasic is making some
changes to allow X-10 TTL I/O in the background (a la the way they handle
serial streams) which has been better for roZetta's health than
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or even gallons of resveritrol.

The changes will let me eliminate the adapters that had been needed to deal
with the sometimes laggard interrupts and I can utilize my initial board
design. It does require use of the ZX-40a version of the ZBasic chip but
being able to jettison the adapters more than compensates for the $10 extra
for the "a" version of the chip.

The changes also allow specifying the X-10 data polarity so I can make the
opto-couplers optional. I don't think they are needed but anyone who feels
otherwise can build an adapter.

Another change to an existing ZBasic function will greatly improve handling
of RF and IR inputs without any significant increase in overhead. Long range
it should allow using non-X10 RF & IR codes as inputs.

I expect to have an alpha version of the new ZBasic in a matter of days. If
all goes well I should be able to finalize everything and have boards
available just after the first of the year (assuming ZBasic releases the new
version by then).

I will have a handful of fully assembled boards (less ZX-40a, EM202 and
optional battery-backed RTC module) available before year-end for about $60
each. Some have already been betrothed. I will provide details on my web
page once they are ready.

If you are interested in following further developments, the roZetta group
on Yahoo is likely to see a bit more traffic from this point.

The roZetta PDFs on the web page are now out-of-date. I'll try to bring them
up to date over the next few days.

This took 4-5 times as long as I expected when I started but I think the end
result will be worth the wait.

http://davehouston.net
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/roZetta/
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