Hardware::iButton and Device::ParallelPort

[Scott Penrose]

Hey Dudes,

I have become the maintainer of Hardware::iButton and intend to put it 
up on CPAN (in its current form) on the weekend.
I have lots of mods I plan to do, mainly around improving the serial 
port interfaces and possibly using the C code as a potential optional 
backend to the pure perl one.

I thought people may also be interested that I have a good little board 
layout for outputs and temperature sensors.

I also now have working the output (just with LED outputs) and a 
temperature input.
The Temperature chips are about $8, measure from -10 to +85 c and are 
..5 accurate ! Really amazing.
They also seem to react VERY quickly.

The real long term will be inputs to JINI (embedded Java Machines on a 
single board), but these massively increase the complexity of the 
protocol, which is all in code, not in hardware. The alternative is the 
link with the existing C code above but that has many disadvantages:
	- Not GNU code (free, not really sure of the license yet) - seems to 
be public domain ?
	- C files, not really easily linkable libraries, but I may be able to 
change that
	- Not very cross platform, although Linux and Windows are supported.

For those also interested I am releasing a new version of 
Device::ParallelPort to do linux parport access directly in perl, no 
more C compiles / XS modules for that. You still require a compile for 
the direct access linux module. My windows 32 DLL binding is also 
almost complete, I lack the testing ability though :-)

Scott
-- 
Scott Penrose
Welcome to the Digital Dimension
http://www.dd.com.au/
scottp at dd.com.au

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