Yes. The 1-wire stuff from Dallas is quite cool. If you've got a PIC/AVR stuff than it's just easier to use one of those to interface it to the serial port. As most of the other cheap iButton/1-wire adapters require you to do bitbanging on the serial or parallel port.

Unfortunately you'll probably end up using the same chip as the empeg uses so if you're not very careful you can put it into thermostat mode. But then again since it is a large package you can just chuck it or reprogram it if you've got the time.

I've got a Dallas iButton developer kit at home and it is quite neat to play about with

- Trevor