[Coco] ESP8266 BBS setup

[Brett Gordon]

On Jul 31, 2017 9:44 PM, "Michael Furman" <n6il at ocs.net> wrote:
>
> Bill,
>
> I was the one who did some investigation of the stock AT code that comes
with the esp8266.  I found that the stock code is not usable for using with
DriveWire at all.  I have my own custom esp8266 firmware that I have been
working on that is a complete transparent bridge: you telnet to it and the
bytes sent over wifi go to the coco, and whatever the coco sends goes back
out the other direction. The stock firmware does not work this way, and in
fact is really broken if you are expecting a transparent communication
channel like this or any other modem would provide while it is connected.
>

I concur.  I haven't perused the esp firmware source, bit emprical tests
with fuzix and "passthru" mode fail pretty hard.  Regular packet mode may
work, but iirc, require lots of futzing around with received packet: ascii
to binary conversion for packet lengths, parsing off the ipc text, and
rejecting spurious response packets. :(   the up side is:  multiplexing tcp
connections should be doable.

Also: there's no way to throttle (all or just some) of these
connections...so let the dropped data ensue! (and hope your channel demuxer
code can handle this)

>
> IIRC RiBBS is a os-9 bbs system right? If that is the case it would be
possible to write a custom esp8266 firmware that runs a mini DriveWire
server on it that accepts incoming telnet connections and can open a /N
virtual serial channel on the nitros9 side, or I guess a bbs would want to
open multiple /N  ports and sit on them until someone connects, could be a
solution there too.

If someone has done python for the esp then you could use your python based
dw server?  Although it would be a great idea to use one or two gpio pins
for handshaking.

Anyway: good luck Bill!

> --
> Michael R. Furman
> Email: n6il at ocs.net
> Phone: +1 (408) 480-5865
>
> > On Jul 30, 2017, at 3:14 PM, Bill Nobel <b_nobel at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hey guys I’ve acquired a few extra ESP8266’s and decided to hook one up
to the Coco 3.    I got the ESP8266 setup for 19,200 baud and I have it
running & connecting to sites no problems.  But now that I having it going,
I’ve gotten an inspiration.
> >
> > I would like to revive my old RiBBS BBS system and bring it back to
life on the Coco 3 VIA telnet. Aside from port forwarding the router, what
other things do I need to setup on the network.  I do have various systems
I can configure if need be (Raspberry Pi, Mac, Linux & Windows machines) I
also realize that I need to write a asm translation on the 3 for the
incoming/outgoing packets on the 8266 in the system driver (due to the way
the data is produced to the RS232 from the 8266 and vice versa).
> >
> > Thanks for any pointers.
> >
> > Bill Nobel
> > b_nobel at hotmail.com<mailto:b_nobel at hotmail.com>
> >
> >
> >
> >
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