Yes, thats a very interesting board, cant wait to get mine! Got it as an early bird. :) Should have bought a couple more, thou. But one is okay for the moment. Got the acrylic "case" too!
I recently bought this same "cheap" tablet. I thought I will use it on my wall as a huge light switch to manage all my light in the living room and kitchen.
After playing around a while I think that except the viewing angle of the display (which is total crap) the tablet is amazingly usable.
Even when I just switch lights on and off occasionally the battery lasted 10 days!! I was shocked to see this with a cheap Chinese pad.
I also use a Nexus 7 which is of course better, but I have to say the cheap one is nice, too. :)
I control my home with a dsPIC33fj and over ethernet/RS485. The Webinterface sliders for some RGB lights in my living room look like this:
Is this what you are looking for?
Btw: the backend is done by me and the frontend webinterface stuff (design) made a friend of mine. If you are interested in the slider stuff, I can ask him if I can share this here.
The backend stuff is just data transmission with get and software pwm or transmission of data over RS485 to my PWM boards.
With JTAG, you need to power the device on its own, like with the supplied wall brick or something. Clock for the chip (the main system clock) is provided by the chips crystal, so nothing changed there. ;) The rest of the signals come from the buspirate or busblaster.
Hehe so I'm not the only one ;). I ran out of small xtals so I had to improvise. Oh and the RS485 transceiver board in the picture was now replaced by a etched version ;). I can provide eagle files if someone is interested.
The TX pin is high when idle! So thats alright. You can connect your probe to TX and configure a single trigger for a falling edge, this way you can see if the device is sending some stuff on the uart port. ;)
Just build my MCP2200 board and I am using it for RS485 communication with automatic TX switchover (half duplex bus).
I added a p-channel mosfet to switch the transceiver from receive to send when a low signal is on the uart TX (it goes to GND when sending). Works great and no software is required on the PC for working with RS485. Well, it probably should listen if there is communication on the bus and only send if there is not, but it can be implemented in hardware as well.
Tested it with my PIC on RS485 with ds30loader, could easily flash the PIC! ds30loader is modified to work with RS485, so it uses a TX_Enable line. ;)
EDIT: Did some research, the "siemens IQP-530" or "IQP-510" should be perfect for this. ;) Just looked on ebay, here in germany the 510 is just 3€ with shipping... and it has a flash!
and standard relays that fit this footprint with 5V oder 12V DC. I use these boards with a webplatform (my own board but quite similar to the DP one from software point of view) and software I2C. If you are interested, I can give you the software needed for I2C to work. ;)
Best regards.
EDIT: Forgot the eagle files: http://mega-bug.net/relay_board.zip EDIT2: The vreg, port expander and darlington array can be sampled from TI... just FYI. :)