[Coco] Stand-alone DriveWire devices.

[James Dessart]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2004 alsplace at pobox.com wrote:

> It dawns on me that there must be some really cheap PIC-type 
> programmable device with memory storage and some programmable CPU.  
> Some of these gadgets are very cheap.  If there was such a device, it 
> might be interesting to make a standalone "DriveWire" hardware unit 
> that could just plug into a CoCo's serial port.  Anyone out there 
> familiar with the state of the art for BASIC STAMP or PIC type chips?  
> It would just need to have a fast serial port and some form of backed 
> up memory (flash, battery backed RAM?).
> 
> Thoughts?

Oh, I like this idea. :) Atmel's AVR chips are both speedy enough and have
support for a wide range of things, like Atmel's flash chips (of course),
as well as serial. There's also strong support for gcc targeting the AVRs,
so porting code to them is a breeze.

Boisy, off hand, is there anything in the protocol that would require a
sophisticated processor, ie. compute intensive portions? Does it require
32-bit math, or will an 8-bit processor work? What's the max space
addressable per disk with DriveWire?

For that matter, it might be possible to network two CoCos through
DriveWire...

There's another project on my plate. :) Unfortunately, you can't have two
DriveWire servers connected to the same CoCo.

James