[Coco] CoCo Ethernet for $25-$30...

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 12:20 PM, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:

> Which brings me to the Raspberry Pi... It's $35, and about the same price as some of these dedicated hardware solutions. It's cheaper today to hook up a micro Linux machine like the Pi to the CoCo and do stuff (audio, graphics, internet) in software than it would be to buy an RS232 pak.
>
> With the Pi, it would be possible to hook one of those up to the CoCo and do just about anything -- the CoCo could send a string to configure it, then one byte command could tell the Pi to go download mail and send it back as a .tar file via xmodem or whatever, already formatted. Graphics could be downsized, etc.. But that's not really having the CoCo "do" anything.
>
> Yet, it's so tiny, and runs "headless" and doesn't need a PC or anything... That might really be the best thing to hook to a CoCo.
>
>
> Is anyone attempting any Pi/CoCo stuff?
>

The DriveWire 4 server and GUI both run on the Raspberry Pi, and
provide full DW4 functionality exactly the same as running DW4 on a
PC.  DW4 also runs on certain Linksys routers, the Nokia N800 tablet,
and other small devices.

You can run just the DW server (very small footprint, needs only a few
MB of ram) on the Pi/other embedded device and connect to that server
with the GUI from a regular PC.  You can also completely manage the DW
server from the CoCo and not use the GUI at all.   Unlike the other
small devices, the Pi can also run the GUI locally.  Full support for
the Pi is built into DriveWire releases since version 4.3.1 IIRC.

I would very much like to put a Pi in a ROMPak (it fits perfectly!).
However, using a serial interface is just slow and cumbersome... We
need a way to interface from the Pi to the bus directly, especially
since then we could build the Pi into a usable rompak that you just
plug in and go.
One route is to use the GPIO pins on the Pi as a parallel port or
similar interface, another is to use the SPI interface on the pi to
something that would talk to the coco bus.  I've talked with many
people over the past couple years about ways to do this, and there are
options but no clear solution that has been taken forward yet to my
knowledge.