I made a lot of changes to the serial stuff. This code is the merge from the davep-mods branch. There are some new lcd commands for testing and playing. If non empty, the value of the variable is pushed into the input buffer and then executed. If you're like me, and I know I am, then you download bootldrs all the time.
Power again reboots automatically to a prompt.
It is written in python and runs on the host. All of python is available to use. When started, you are sitting in python's command line interpreter with the ability to send command to the device. You can parse this to extract results. If people are interested we will package up talterm for release.