The Megapus
I worked at a company that made accessories for telecommunications equipment. Most of the telco equipment still uses deprecated RS-232 serial ports, and so all of their products do too.
At one point, I was tasked with making a device that could send an identical serial port data stream to several devices at once. Shortly thereafter, the Megapus was born.
This crazy device took 1 serial port data stream and a 12VAC power supply and split it out into twenty devices at once.
We considered calling it the Icosapus considering the 20 outputs, but I actually crated the device to be infinitely scalable simply by adding more I/O cards with a power supply every fifth one.
The PCBs (printed circuit boards) I used happened to be unpopulated parts for other products that repurposed nicely after shuffing a few components around. Hence the two circuit boards for each layer of four outputs.
April 3rd, 2006 at 12:36 am
I got here through a post on the MAKE-blog, and I’m quite interested in the circuit you used.
I use PIC microcontrollers with a built-in serial port. Most motherboards only have one serial port (if at all!) these days, so if I want to hook up more than one microcontroller device to a PC, I’d have to use expensive USB-to-serial chips or converters.
But with a rig like the Megapus, I could hook ‘em up all together and devise a protocol to adress a single device — the other devices would ignore the datastream that’s not adressed to them.
Could you give us a bit more detail of the circuitry? Thanks!
April 3rd, 2006 at 8:46 am
I’d also be very interested in a more detailed post on this one!
April 3rd, 2006 at 10:31 pm
Also interested in a schematic!
May 21st, 2006 at 8:45 am
I can’t image a practical use for such an item, unless individual RS232 ports were selectable or could be cross connected to individual ethernet converters? Just thinking about this from a telecom perspective, where craft interfaces don’t have addresses or anything distinguishable from any other system until you’re actually authenticated.
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:16 am
yer i would like some schematics 4 it 2 plz cus im relly interestd in mking it 2
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