There's a lot of helpful hardware-types around here, hopefully one of you can help me out. This seems like it should be pretty simple, but unfortunately I know just enough about hardware to be dangerous.

I'm trying to add a remote control (and display.. some details in this thread) to my Empeg via serial with a neat combination joystick/optical encoder/pushbutton. I'm at the point where I've got the 7 different pins at TTL-level for each of the seven different actions.

Now, how do I get those 8 (let's just assume there's 8 to make things nice and powers of 2) parallel bits and stuff them down the serial line so they can be read by software on the Empeg? In other words, what's the big box in the middle here?



(sorry, couldn't resist the underpants gnome thing)