> I believe the ATtiny2313 might be exactly what you'd want (hardware > UART, external clock not required, DIP package). That certainly makes it sound good. ...google... Tempting. It's not _exactly_ what I'd want; it demands something very much like a PROM pogrammer to get code into it. I also can't help wondering how you can have three general-purpose 8-bit I/O registers in a device with fewer than 24 pins; there must be something I'm missing, but then, I haven't read the whole doc file. > A good 232->uC that can go faster is likely to be trouble some, > unless you have one of the really high speed serial cards for a Sun > (or other machine). I have a Magma SBus serial-port card that can be set to run as fast as megabit speeds. I don't know how reliable it is at such speeds, as I've nothing for it to talk to at that kind of speed. I might try to build something of my own for it to talk to, but I have had little success with logic circuits involving signals approaching the megahertz range (no experience -> no successes -> still no experience). > For a some amount more cash spent on the project, you could build > something network capable and a lot faster. To me, that would be the > write way to do it. It seems to me that ethernet isn't expensive if > you can built it yourself, but it is pretty expensive to buy premade > modules. But then you need a computer on the far side of it, and you're right back to getting the bits off a computer. At least, I can't really iamgine how you're going to do any kind of network protocol without _some_ kind of computer to implement it. Or were you thinking of doing that in silicon? /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B