[Coco] Printing from DW

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Oct 27, 2014 3:57 PM, "Zippster" <zippster278 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I kind of like the wireless replacement for the serial connection to
Drivewire idea.
> Has anyone done anything like this already?
>

You can use a Bluetooth serial adapter to do wireless drivewire, its simply
a matter of swapping the serial cable for the adapter *if* you have one of
the adapters that just works.  Unfortunately there are also some that do
not just work, and I'm not sure if the details are sorted out.

This is actually the only way to use DroidWire, the Android version of DW
(available free in the Play store if anyone wants it).  I demoed this at
cocofest last year, but I'm not sure if anyone has used it otherwise.

That was mostly just a "because we can" thing, but the same adapter works
fine for wireless drivewire to a standard server.  You can buy a matched
set of adapters to use serial ports on both ends, or if your computer has
Bluetooth support you can just use one adapter on the coco side.

In the end, replacing serial with serial over Bluetooth doesn't do much for
you unless the cable is really a problem.  More interesting would be a
Becker port sort of solution using a faster means of transport.  On the
FPGA and emulators, all the buffering and transport is done by external
mechanisms, the coco just sees a magical address that can be read or
written.  You could probably recreate this using one of the wiznet tcpip
controllers or a raspberry pi, some slave processing thing would be
required but its not unthinkable.  Such an interface would be handy for all
sorts of uses, not at all limited to DriveWire.. That's also true of the
current Becker port implementation for what its worth.  Nothing DW specific
at all about the interface, actually DW is poorly designed for such an
interface in some ways.