5 hours ago, Scott Robison said:
You need available IO lines in order for the two to communicate. I don't know exactly what hardware the X8 will be based on, but I doubt it will have sufficient IO lines to accomplish this task.
Well, we don't have many details of the X8, but if it allows an RTC, then it may have an I2C channel for communication. If that is brought out on the board to a pin header, then a two wire ribbon cable could connect it to the CX16 I2C.
But part of the cost savings compared to the CX16e is that with the 128K SPRAM all of the RAM it uses, it doesn't have to bring data and address buses out.
And we know that when the Vera FPGA moved from 8 registers addressed on the system bus to 32, which is two more pins, they also pulled out the serial port, for lack of pins, So if the LX8 is allocating pins to the USB, and to things like supporting an I2C bus for a RTC, then they wouldn't have the pins to plug it into a CX16p slot.