[Coco] $4 USB HOST a chip

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 23 February 2017 08:30:23 Allen Huffman wrote:

> On Feb 23, 2017, at 6:52 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at shentel.net> wrote:
> > That might be a worthwhile project, Frances. However that is exactly
> > what we do when we run drivewire, we are using our drivewire
> > connected PC to do that translation.
>
> Does this work with Max-10 and such? Or just OS-9?

AFAIK, only nitros9

> But many of us don't want to tether our CoCo to a PC.
Chuckle.  My "tether" is a 3 foot dw cable from the coco, inti an ft232 
based 7 port usb hub, which is attached to a 10 meter powered usb2.0 
extension, strung thru the floor joists in the ceiling of the basement 
until it comes up thru a 3/4" hole in the floor to the usb tree here. 
There are at least 3 "hubs" in that circuit, but drivewire here uses 
ttyusb1 and is happy as a clam. ttyusb0 is heyu's x10 stuff via a cm11a 
interface. I haven't turned on the Christmas lights in 10+ years, but 
they are on for about 3 hrs every night, tracking sundown times anyway.

> Now, with the $5 Pi zero and some hookup hardware...
>
> And a $30 Pi 3 has WiFi built in so it could talk to a server anywhere
> else on the network, which would be good for those of us that can't
> set a CoCo up near the computer.

But thats a security hole. A huge one in this day and age.  Any such 
connection s/b secured by an elliptically derived passphrase and some 
sort of active monitoring of who is using it. I had enabled the radio in 
my dd-wrt router so my sons could get online with their IPhones when 
they were here for a few days last summer, but forgot to turn it off 
when they left. But imagine my surprise on reading my cable phone and 
internet bill a couple months later and seeing that I had used 80 
gigabytes of bandwidth. Normal is about 30. I found 2 of the neighbors 
were logged into my wifi port. Its not bridged to me, just to the 
internet so I couldn't see what porno they might have been watching, and 
other that the ip, I couldn't ID who, so I just turned the radio off. 
Phone/net bill back to normal. It didn't cost me because I'm allocated 
300G/month, but I'd be the one found guilty of whatever should the 
copyright sharks or child porno folks come calling.  Secure it, its 
common sense. Here, dmesg says the pi's radio was looked at it during 
the boot, but that was discovery only, no enabling. Sure, cable costs 
but its a one time cost and about 10000% more secure.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
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Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>