Open source, stand alone, ASCII terminal project

I and a couple of other people thought it would be fun to build our own stand alone video terminal. The prototype is a 3x5" PCB that is completely self contained - all you need to connect is a VGA monitor, a PS/2 keyboard, 12V power, and a RS-232 connection to a host computer of your choice. The idea is that you could easily stick one inside the case of an old VGA monitor, add a keyboard, and then have an ASCII terminal. No PC required :-) I did the hardware design and PC boards, and James Markevitch did the lion's share of the firmware, with help from David Betz, Ethan Dicks and Dave McGuire. The firmware is all open source, GPL licensed, and is managed as a Source Forge project. The microprocessors (yes, there are two used) are 8051 cores and the firmware for both is written mostly in C using the SDCC compiler. SDCC and the other development tools we're using are all FREE, mostly open source, and the primary MCU can be in system programmed using a regular PC and an ordinary serial connection. No expensive development tools or special hardware programmers are needed. Enough firmware finished now to be a functional VT220 clone - it can run EDT and vi already - but there's still lots to be done. We'd like to find a couple more people to join the development team and help us finish off version 1. In particular, some of the major things that still need doing include - Fonts (a VT220 has a surprisingly large number of DEC specific fonts) Serial EEPROM drivers for saving setup and configuration data Documentation, users manual and web pages (on SourceForge) and of course testing Some of the things we're thinking about working on after V1 is finished - Emulating other ASCII terminals (ADM, TeleVideo, Wyse, maybe more) Adding graphics (Tek 4006/4010/4014 emulation, ReGIS, maybe more) If you're interested, I have two more of the prototype PC boards that I can sell. And if you really want, you can always wire wrap your own without a PC board - the schematics are available as part of the project documentation. email me and let me know if you are interested in working on the project. Right now I'd prefer that the PC boards go to people who have the time to actually help out with the project in the short term, so if so if you'd just like to have one of the terminals but don't have time to help then please stand by. There'll be another announcement when we have one ready for release. Bob