I'm happy for you to 'basically own it' - consider copyright assigned or whatever.

It takes quite a while to find the empeg too.
This is because this read blocks for 5 secs or so.
A check for myIS.available() >0 speeds up discovery a lot (30s->5s for me) -- *but* I guess this may be a problem if the serial port is slow?

	public int read(byte[] _buffer) throws IOException {

		int pos = 0;

		while (pos < _buffer.length) {

			if (myIS.available() >0) {

				int bytesRead = read(_buffer, pos, _buffer.length - pos);

				if (bytesRead == -1) {

					throw new IOException("The connection to the device dropped while attemping to read data from it.");

				} else {

					pos += bytesRead;

				}

			} else	{

				throw new IOException("The connection had no data to read");

			}	

		}

		return pos;

	}

mmmm - I'm not sure I like it