[Coco] Ethernet Port Cartridge for the Coco 3

[Boisy G. Pitre]

On Feb 5, 2013, at 11:44 AM, Steve Batson <steve at batsonphotography.com> wrote:

> I know I've seen several threads on this in the past with all sorts of opinions on it. While I have a lot of hardware and software experience in the PC world, I'm not  a circuit level person nor do I have experience writing drivers and such to make this type of thing work. I do find it interesting and have some genuine questions.
> 
> While some say that the CoCo is too slow to implement an ethernet interface with software to implement the TCP/IP stack on it (and I totally understand that), wouldn't it be possible to create a product that handled all of the Ethernet hardware as well as the networking stack and just transfer requests and responses to the coco when appropriate? For example, if software was doing a file transfer, couldn't the coco just pass the request  off to the controller and transfer the data at speeds that it can handle with the controller doing all of the heavy lifting and buffering as needed?

Steve,

This is already being done right now with my ArduinoCoCo project. I have outbound connections working, and am working on the firmware to allow incoming connections (via inetd).  

The only thing is that this is very much prototype hardware (an amalgamation of a CoCoPort and an Arduino Mega 2560). But it works, and will be the basis for an all-in-one card for the CoCo.

The Arduino solution is using the Wiznet 5100 chip, which handles up to four simultaneous connections.  It's a bit limited in that respect.

BTW, I picked up an Arduino Mega 2560 "clone" called a Funduino off of eBay for $17 shipped from China, and it works identically to the Arduino Mega 2560. Fantastically cheap stuff.