xAP to C-Bus production hardware IT WORKS

["Kevin Hawkins" <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

AT LAST .. Just in time for UKHA2004...

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 !!
Although I say so myself they are very professional and look like any other
volume produced product. Here is an early picture of the board
http://tinyurl.com/2d27h partially
assembled, it needs a couple more chips
and connectors adding and the C-Bus module and Rabbit core is not mounted
yet, they go at the top of the board in the pic. I shall post some more
pictures of the fully completed versions and the case soon, as soon as I
find my camera download cable. (I will send pics direct to you Mark as
well).

(Hope that link works - if not it is in the UKHA Yahoo Photos area /Kevin)

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. There are
a couple more bonus hardware features there too for 'the future'.  Of
course
these extra features need firmware support to be useful, currently all that
I have commited to is the C-Bus to xAP gateway and I've said that I am
looking at HomeVision to 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. In fact I would prefer you do
this
such that I have only one codebase to support.

I will post more details & the final price for the MK11 units
shortly on the xAP Automation group rather than crosspost on both..

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xap_automation/


K

* BTW There will also be a 'software only' C-Bus offering for HomeVision
that allows C-Bus control from macros similar to the way X10 works now.
This
is a slightly less capable version and has lower performance than the
hardware controller (HomeVision is effectively tasked with handling the
continual C-Bus parsing). I shall be showing this at UKHA2004 too.