[Coco] Pi in a Pak - Was: Coco -> Arduino -> Drivewire and back again

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 20 June 2014 15:58:41 Paul Barton did opine
And Gene did reply:
> How come I don't see USB to/from the CoCo3???
> 
> Paul

First off Paul, welcome back!

Two left half of the glutius maximus answers Paul.

1, USB has a limited cable range when unboosted of about 5 feet, although 
I have two 10 meter booster amplified extension cables that work well 
here, but I got paper cuts in my nose paying for them.

2. You need an ser-usb adapter right near the coco. Once its in usb 
format, my dw server runs to /dev/ttyUSB0, and neither one actually knows 
there is a USB circuit in the middle.

So it can be done, but by the time you get another good hub on the end of 
the extension cable you'll have 100-140 bucks in it.  The extra hub is 
needed for me as I have a Brother B&W laser printer sitting on the coco3 
desk, that the coco can use just by listing a file to >/p where /p is the 
dw version and its driver in the bootfile.  Beautiful 600 dpi output at 19 
pages/minute, something the coco never dreamed of in its heyday.

I tell dw to save the ascii text dw receives as a file, and have another 
daemon script that uses inotifywait to detect the closing of the file when 
the listing is finished, which in turn hands the file off to the cups 
version of lp, which takes maybe 5 seconds to render it to data the 
Brother understands, then 5 secs or so for the Brother to warm up the 
drum, and the paper almost falls out.  Overall, many times faster than the 
old house shaker Xerox 1650ro I used to use, but no film ribbons have been 
available for it in 15+ years now.  Shopping around, the Brother can be 
had for less than a hundred dollar bill.  Whats not to like?

Oh, and steer clear of the PL2303 adapters, use an FDTI. The pl2303 has a 
habit of throwing away the first byte of a packet if its been sleeping for 
more than 10 seconds.

> On Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 12:13 PM, Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Chris Osborn <fozztexx at fozztexx.com>
> > 
> > wrote:
> > > On Jun 20, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> ideally, a rompak could be made that did all those things and more
> > >> as nicely as cocofdc does disks.  pi in a pak can do all of those
> > >> things, but probably not as nicely.  still, a step in the right
> > >> direction
> > > 
> > > Weren't you and Jim Brain working on a way to do that via SPI
> > 
> > communication between the CoCo and the Pi?
> > 
> > Well.. if me saying "wow that would be nice" and Jim doing all the
> > work can be seen as working together.. sure :)
> > 
> > I am hopelessly inept at hardware things, so at the mercy of those
> > who know more to connect the Pi (or anything that could do the
> > networking and other stuff, i don't have any special love for the
> > pi).
> > 
> > I haven't heard of any progress from Jim but I will never give up
> > hope!  As Nick pointed out, the Pi isn't the perfect platform anyway,
> > since it does need some time to boot up.  We are getting there
> > though. Some day....
> > 
> > --
> > Coco mailing list
> > Coco at maltedmedia.com
> > http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco


Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
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US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS