Paul,
I don't particularly want to be messing with Eclipse, unless I have to, part of my design premise was to use relatively simple tools to make relatively simple modules.
Having said that it sounds as though we will be working towards a similar goal from a remarkably similar starting point and I would be delighted to collaborate.
I think we should keep most if no all communication on the forum to stay within the spirit of open source. I know I will need help from the community and I hope our work will be useful to others in general.
I haven't progressed much from the planning stage, I have been looking at concepts, and I think I will need some form of multi drop serial communications so that I can place functionality in distributed nodes, Nano's or Mini's I thought.
CAN-BUS would fit the bill nicely for several reasons but I don't want to buy hardware and I expect I could get a way with a less complex, slower version than the standard implementation. I haven't found anything yet that implements CAN-BUS in software, SoftSerial esque.
Some time ago I roughed out a half duplex device to devices protocol that was address-less with a rolling message priority and packet data type ID and was a little suprised to find just how similar to CAN that it was once I started searching for the correct concepts.
I would live to build a software library to implement a CAN type protocol specifically for Arduino based devices, but perhaps that is a step too far.
Enough with the flight of fancy .... There may well be something out there already that is a quick win and even if there isn't I think some more research is required before I go committing to building a whole new protocol.
I have some experience of MicroLogix and RedLion, although probably not as much as you, but I suspect that my conceptual plan is broadly similar to yours.
Did you grasp my pseudo web page for liquid crystal idea, what do you think?
The thought process is to have the 'page', just a 20X4 text display with some soft keys, display text that can contain replaceable parameters from named variables or possibly arrays. Each 'page file' would define what to display, how to display it and what the function of any button is.
I envisage standard functions like load a new page or modify the value at display address X.X with the definition file being something akin to XML, stored on the SD card.
If you are up for it we should decide on a Blog, Blog's or thread name, perhaps a combination of all three.
Obviously it would make sense to have the projects outlined and documented in a Blog but perhaps we should keep individual concepts in threads so that they don't get too long and will still search well.
Good to chat, thoughts?
Al