[Coco] CoCo Ethernet for $25-$30...

[John Kent]

I use an XPort AR board to provide ethernet to RS232.
It's fairly expensive.
Having a Raspberry Pi configured to do the same thing would be a cheaper 
solution.

If you are looking for something for the CoCo there is always the 
Contiki OS which is now being touted as for "the internet of things"..
Adam Dunkel does have lwIP (light weight IP) and uIP stacks intended for 
small microcontroller applications.
I think it was used as a demo with the Power PC in the Virtex 4 FPGA for 
a training exercise from Avnet.
The Virtex 4 has a Power PC 405 built in along with two tri-mode 
ethernet controllers.
On the board I have only one is accessible though.

I do have some other FPGA boards with an ethernet controller on them, 
namely the XSA-3S1000 & XST-3.0 from Xess and an Altera/Terasic DE2-70 
board.
These are fairly expensive boards though.

Gary Becker did show me the WizNet some time ago and was considering 
using it in an add on board for the Terasic DE1 board.
The 6809 in the CoCo only runs at 1MHZ or less, and you don't have DMA 
for transferring packets into memory.
Many ethernet controllers though have internal buffers for receiving 
packets.
There are ethernet "shields" for the Arduino, so you could possibly use 
them as an RS232 to ethernet convters..

Drivewire is fine , but it has to be tethered to the serial port of a PC.
I'm wondering if Aaaron could make it support ethernet as a possible 
transfer mechanism.
Drivewire is intended as a disk server for the CoCo.
I see no reason why that can't use ethernet as a physical interface.
it would be adding to it rather than subtracting from it.
Drive wire does have a port system of sorts.
i.e. you can run other services under it.

I haven't read Aarons recent posts on Drivewire to see what his approach 
would be.

John.


On 9/04/2013 3:02 AM, Mark Martin wrote:
> Allen,
>
> I've been working on a design for multiple computers using Arduino,
> possibly FPGA, ethernet, and local caching storage.  I've been
> contemplating a commercial solution, but I may be more likely to be
> successful if I were to consider a more open-source solution, I suspect.
>
... snip

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