Yes!
By hijacking passthrough printing, I think you can already do both of those things.
See the attached screenshot.
At the unix shell, you turn on passthrough with 'tput mc5' and off again with 'tput mc4'. Anything in-between will be sent as binary data to Absolute. Typically, this would be raw data to send to a printer, but there are options to send to a file or even dump to a local serial port. When enabled, the serial port option has bi-directional capabilities as well, so anything read from Absolute while in passthrough mode will actually be read from the serial port instead.
This sounds like what you're looking for. Let me know how you make out.
B
