[Coco] The BIGGEST PROBLEM with (So-Called) NEW CoCo Hardware...

[Dave Philipsen]

On 3/5/2017 9:38 AM, Allen Huffman wrote:
> On Mar 5, 2017, at 9:21 AM, Bill Gunshannon <bill.gunshannon at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> 4.  Putting USB on the COCO would be expensive and not particularly practical.  Of course, you can
>> print to anything automatically thru a PC using DRIVEwire, so that is already a done deal.
> Myth.
>
> Take a $5 Raspberry Pi zero, which has USB host, and interface it's Digital IO pins to the CoCO bus, and now you can use anything it can use.
>
> But the Pi is Linux and that sucks because it takes ages to boot so that really would be a lousy interface ;)

You are kidding about the boot time on the Pi being slow, right?  My Pi 
boots faster than my Windows 7 computer! I think if you worked at it you 
could trim some of the unnecessary junk and get the Pi to boot even 
faster (maybe under 10 seconds).

>
> A universal all-in-one USB interface that is fast booting is trickier, but having a Serial Pak that is USB, or a USB Mouse interface, or other dedicated packs is cheap. Heck, you code have one pack with four USB ports on it, one for serial, one for MIDI, one for.... and that would still be cheap. :)
>