abecedarian

Not quite Arduino with wireless modem simple, since ISM bands are noisy and timing / latency must be fairly precise, but not really that far off. Have to also realize the difficulties which were encountered by those people emulating GROM and such in a cart, no?

Seems so. My thoughts were to somehow encode the side port connections' statuses into words broadcast over fast ISM band. Unused bits could be some sort of encryption / security or such, maybe something to synch with a co-broadcast signal on a lower ISM freq which contains encryption / security keys or some such other important thingamaboppers. Oh well. I guess if something like this pops up, we'll be following it.

Got another OTW idea.... Wireless side port / flex cable interface using 2.4/5.8GHz ISM bands? Might be able to hybridize and use 433/866MHz and 2.4/5.8GHz together, with one for some sort of parity / security and the other for signaling.

Would probably be easier with regards to actually routing power to the end-use device, and depending on that device, to use a linear or LDO regulator in a device to pull the 3v3 from either a +12V or +5V source, like how 12 and 5 are attained in the PEB. But that just satisfies primary power supply issues; one still has to interface the logic signals and maybe even RS232 signals. As an aside, there is/was a project for Arduino, and a fork for MSP430 and Stellaris/Tiva (Arm M4F) stuff, which presented a UI on the computer, with toggles and buttons, and allowed one to read analog-to-digital converters and set digital I/O, PWM, and digital-to-analog converters. Something like that with a simple scripting language to handle "processing" signals could be more than a token curiosity, no?

This is sort of what I meant about interfacing to TI's MSP430/432 microcontrollers for data acq, but I meant to use their "Launchpad" kits, which feature a UART (serial port) that can be interfaced with for transferring things back and forth. Some of those TI chips are quite feature packed too, ranging in features comparable to any of the Atmel parts. Some even sport more RAM than most fully expanded 99/4A's. The main drawback is they're 3.3 volt parts, not 5v.

If so, unfortunate as I was just getting interested.

Perhaps interfacing to a Wi-Fi security camera...?

I'm just getting back into 99/4a things but was thinking about PEB or sidecar things that could do rudimentary data acquisition using TI MSP430/432, or weather station things, or doing AIS decoding and such. Also was thinking about integrating a GPS module as an alternative to real-time clock things.

I'm sure someone will be along to further this, but if I remember what I read a while back properly, it has to do with how the Basic interpreter parses and tokenizes statements. ​Looking forward to hearing a better explanation than what I can give.