PCI card based serial and parallel port

Yesterday I went to Sim Lim square for the monthly (or bi-monthly) IT refreshment trip. My intention was mainly to check out network based media player. But interestingly I found out that there are shops selling PCI based serial/parallel port card. You get real serial port and real parallel port from the card. Typically USB to serial port cable can do most of the job. But typical USB to parallel cable is totally useless for interfacing to anything other than your old parallel port based printer. Therefore if you have parallel port based cheap JTAG debugger (say ARM or MSP430), then you are out of luck if you do not have parallel port with your new PC (laptop or desktop).

One of the vendor is ST-LAB (http://www.st-lab.com/). It is using MOSChip (http://www.moschip.com/pepc.php) as its brain. The single serial or parallel port version is selling at about S$23.

Another company providing chips is Oxford Semiconductor (http://www.softconnex.com/products/serial/serial.html)

Microchip MCU Ethernet related links collection

http://forum.microchip.com/tm.aspx?m=382036

RTOS Links Collection for Microchip MCUs

http://forum.microchip.com/tm.aspx?m=381449

There are many interesting discussions in the Microchip Forum
about RTOS. There are also more and more RTOS produced for
Microchip MCUs, especially after the introduction of bigger
PICs like dsPIC30, PIC24, dsPIC33 and PIC32.

Ubuntu 8.10 installed

Ubuntu 8.10 has been released and I installed it last Saturday on my Acer M1641 desktop. It is really very smooth. The only thing I need to do is to use the Nvidia proprietary X driver to get 1280x1024 resolution. I did not encounter problems I met with Ubuntu 8.04 (http://mcuee.blogspot.com/search/label/Ubuntu).

Good job, the Ubuntu team!