[Coco] serial cable tricks for drivewire?

[Robert Hermanek]

Lots of good ideas here and in other emails, I'll be experimenting when I 
have time, probably starting with some twisted pairs and seeing if that 
alone can improve things.  I actually have a PC with 10 serial ports in it, 
so I'm inclined to go serial all the way.  I've heard of the serial over 
ethernet but have never really understood it, I might check into it if all 
other avenues fail.

I haven't had a chance to look at the new DW4 server, great news that it 
supports simultaneous connections.  Here's another question:  I noticed 
right away with DW3 that both the "physical" device # command (i.e. DRIVE 
#2) and the "logical" drive # (i.e. DRIVE 10) both allowed any value on the 
coco side of things.  So I set up my server app to support 256 DRIVE #'s (so 
256 DSK compilation files) each of which contained 256 traditional DSK 
images at the expected offsets.  If you do the math on 256 "devices" X 256 
DSK's per device, each DSK containing 160k or so of data, you get to about 
10+ gigs of storage available to any coco accessing the server.  So that 
registered on my scale as "pretty cool."  Does DW4 server also support any 
number of disks in this fashion?

-Robert

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Aaron Wolfe" <aawolfe at gmail.com>
To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2012 10:33 PM
Subject: Re: [Coco] serial cable tricks for drivewire?


> You can get quite a good distance with USB, and then only use a serial
> adapter and serial cable for the last X feet.  You might find it's
> reliable at some ratio between the two (neither usb or serial can do
> the full 50 ft on their own most likely).
> Also, serial to IP (ethernet) conversion allows hundreds of feet via
> ethernet.  You can find old termservers or cisco routers capable of
> serial<->ip cheap on ebay.  Some have lots of serial ports.  I picked
> up a 16 serial port box for $30.
> One last note, the DW4 server also allows multiple cocos and disk image 
> sharing.
>
> On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 3:59 PM, Robert Hermanek
> <rhermanek at centurytel.net> wrote:
>> I have a number of coco's connected to a single server via serial cables 
>> and drivewire. The drivewire server in this case is an application I 
>> wrote myself to be compatible with DW3 HDB-DOS, and since it allows 
>> multiple coco's to access the same DSK images simultaneously, it makes it 
>> easy to swap files between coco's, i.e. build program in Edtasm on one 
>> machine, swivel chair and execute it on another...
>>
>> Sounds great, but the downside to my setup is that the server is located 
>> far away from some of my coco's, and in one case I end up with a serial 
>> cable that is 50+ feet long. This connection is not reliable at 115k 
>> baud.
>>
>> I'm guessing 50+ feet (with no hardware flow control) is well beyond the 
>> official maximum length of a serial cable. Does anyone know of any tricks 
>> to allow longer serial cable connections to function? i.e., better 
>> connectors, different cable, things like that?
>>
>> -Robert Hermanek
>>
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