[Coco] Coco interfacing, running a coco from 12 volts and more.

[Patrick Wilson]

I may be a bit off the mark on this, and i am sure someone on the list will correct any errors i might make, but i had done a lot of subsidiary interfacing with the CoCo back in the day.  What i had ususally done is to set up a board to fit the expansion slot, BUFFERED IT (the CoCo slot is not buffered so this is IMPORTANT) and then gone with a chip that fit the requirement.  For instance, i made a parallel printer port setup for it once using a 6850 chip (it was a dedicated serial to parallel convertor), another i made used an 8255 for general interfacing.  That one is a three port I/O chip with two 8 bit bidirectional ports and another 8 bit port which can be split into two four bit ones.  Each line is addressable so it was VERY flexible.  Now, i don't know how much luck you would have finding either of those these days, but i am sure there are equivalents available.  I would look at stock from Digikey in MN, or others that are still around.  I
 think Jameco still exists out of the Bay Area.  You should be able to set up just about any interface you can think of, as long as you can come up with a viable design.  The CoCo is EXTREMELY flexible in this regard.  What sort of digital I/O were you considering for your project?


From: "haywire666 at aol.com" <haywire666 at aol.com>
To: coco at maltedmedia.com 
Sent: Monday, February 6, 2012 6:42 PM
Subject: [Coco] Coco interfacing, running a coco from 12 volts and more.

I'm new to this mailing list. I used cocos for ages back in the day, ages past everyone else moving on too.


Lately, I've been working on a mobile robot project of sorts. I was going to use a micro controller for controlling it but I 
remembered how great the analog inputs (joystick ports) were for sensors and things like that and I decided to try and use a coco.


I got some old cocos I saved out of some bins in my basement, but so far things have progressed very slowly.


I need info on using pia chips to get digital i/o lines in and out of the coco. After goggling for ages, I found very little on the subject of
interfacing with a coco, which is a shame, I'm sure I remember tons of projects like that in rainbow and other coco magazines.


I also need info on running a coco3 from 12 volts. Right now I'm using a voltage inverter and its terribly inefficient. I'm sure running direct from the 
12 volt gell cell would add tons of run time.  Right now the battery gets drained pretty quick!


If anyone has any old magazine articles that they could scan, or can give me ANY info on these things I would sincerely appreciate it.


If I don't find the info I need I will have to use a microcontroller I guess, but I would REALLY love using a coco for this.


Best regards,


Steven 

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