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

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 6:49 PM, John Kent <jekent at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
>
> I use an XPort AR board to provide ethernet to RS232.
> It's fairly expensive.
> Having a Raspberry Pi configured to do the same thing would be a cheaper
> solution.
>
> If you are looking for something for the CoCo there is always the Contiki OS
> which is now being touted as for "the internet of things"..
> Adam Dunkel does have lwIP (light weight IP) and uIP stacks intended for
> small microcontroller applications.
> I think it was used as a demo with the Power PC in the Virtex 4 FPGA for a
> training exercise from Avnet.
> The Virtex 4 has a Power PC 405 built in along with two tri-mode ethernet
> controllers.
> On the board I have only one is accessible though.
>
> I do have some other FPGA boards with an ethernet controller on them, namely
> the XSA-3S1000 & XST-3.0 from Xess and an Altera/Terasic DE2-70 board.
> These are fairly expensive boards though.
>
> Gary Becker did show me the WizNet some time ago and was considering using
> it in an add on board for the Terasic DE1 board.
> The 6809 in the CoCo only runs at 1MHZ or less, and you don't have DMA for
> transferring packets into memory.
> Many ethernet controllers though have internal buffers for receiving
> packets.
> There are ethernet "shields" for the Arduino, so you could possibly use them
> as an RS232 to ethernet convters..
>
> Drivewire is fine , but it has to be tethered to the serial port of a PC.
> I'm wondering if Aaaron could make it support ethernet as a possible
> transfer mechanism.
> Drivewire is intended as a disk server for the CoCo.
> I see no reason why that can't use ethernet as a physical interface.
> it would be adding to it rather than subtracting from it.
> Drive wire does have a port system of sorts.
> i.e. you can run other services under it.
>

Actually, support for DriveWire over IP is already present in the
current DW4 server.  It is used to support emulators like XRoar.  The
server can listen on a TCP socket or it can make outbound TCP
connections, either way.

We also have support for (very) high speed USB/serial devices, up into
the 10Mbps range, and experimental support for parallel devices.

-Aaron