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Ok. Your bit-banged bus proposal makes sense given the hardware limitations.
The lesson to take from this experience is to define the interfacing requirements before buying any hardware :)
Cheers,
Dave
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Yeah, but the the choice of the ts7400 hardware was pretty much a done deal when we started this effort. We had several other interface boards designed already that use the TS7400. I got into CPLD and then FPGA because we needed to design our own UARTS and a DMX512 lighting controller. The Cyclone III FPGA with its RAM inside makes a great solution for a DMX serial port (which has to send out the same set of 512 bytes many times per second. No UART chip available has that type of operation where you can just load up the data you want and it continually sends it out.
Anyway, you have been a great help, along with a number of others. I will keep posting as necessary and perhaps take you up on your offer to look at my code.
Honored Contributor
