I am looking at interfacing a small hardware piece to the
serial port of my MarkII. Basically, I am looking for a UART
like chip available in a DIP package that performs the basic
serial operations, presents a new byte on a parallel interface,
allows another byte to be written to a parallel interface and
performs the serial transmit of the new byte.

I thought someone in this forum may have done similar serial
interfacing and had some ideas of particular chips to use.

My basic idea involves using a current 8-input A/D converter I have
to relay various information about the car environment to the empeg
where a small application will adjust EQ/Vol like parameters in response.
Things like vehicle-speed, top up/down, etc. I'm hoping to avoid
requiring a microcontroller by using a simple digital design of
1) receive byte index (only lower 3 bits count, address of 0-7)
2) send 1 byte value back

Thanks

Brett

Yup, this can be done. Others have already built interfaces to the player's serial port.

The first one that comes to mind is linked from the FAQ. John Lambon created a serial interface to a steering wheel control stalk.

There are probably others. Anyone else have links?

Believe me, it'll be less hassle using a microcontroller. Use a PIC with built in UART and ADC and it's even easier...

With a UART, you'll need to generate the baud rate clock, and work out some interfacing logic to get the read/write strobes doing what you want. Something like a 6850 is probably what you need if you want to go down that route - but I wouldn't recommend it. Get a PIC starter kit or something similar (AVR, etc)

Hugo

Actually, I might just go the microcontroller route now. I know overall
it would make things easier (and allow for future development) but I
was afraid of getting into SOIC chips (I'm an EE with a soldering problem :)
and/or requiring the purchase of a EEPROM programmer.

After looking closer at some of the PIC stuff, it looks like their are cases
were you can do serial programming and some come in DIP packages. Yeah!

Ok. I'll get back to you all once I put all this stuff together (or have more
questions.)

Thanks

Brett