In reply to:

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... but we couldn't put *everything* on there as it just jacks up the price for the vast majority of people who would never use the extra bits - hence the docking serial port.

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My brother and I have been considering the possibility of a chain of devices for specific purposes that would chain along the serial connection. Each box would basically recognise commands sent to it, and would pass data back to the empeg in its own packaged format, and would pass along any data that wasn't meant for it (i.e. not interfering with any other box).

Now, to me this means communications protocol. We know that there are various ASCII characters already used - F for forward, B for back, or something like that, yeah? Well, let's say my GPS box always precedes its commands with "/G", and commands sent to it are always prefixed by "\G". The software running on the empeg can recognise these characters and send the appropriate command to the relevant daemon; likewise, the daemon can send a message to the box easily enough.

The beauty of this system, IM(NSH)O, is that you can have a virtually unlimited number of boxes (as long as there's a modicum of control on the protocol side) and they don't interfere. Nor does the empeg need a separate interface for each box that someone might plug in. This, to my mind, means that the radio controller could even be one of these boxes, just plugged in through a standardised interface (and with aerial in and audio out to the correct inputs on the empeg).

Or has someone already thought of this?

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