[Coco] DriveWire 4 and Raspberry Pi

[Ed Orbea]

After reading the messages from last year regarding Raspberry Pi, I decided
to try to see if I could get Raspberry Pi to act as a DriveWIre4 server..
While I have not finished this project, I am seeing some "light at the end
of the tunnel". Be aware that I am not a Linux expert. I programmed on
Zilog, Plexus and Pyramid minicomputers many-many years ago and I am in no
way a linux expert, so this is a re-learning process.


I don't know if this will ultimately work for everybody because there are
so many different 'permutations' of CoCo and DriveWire, but for my
configuration, the start if positive.

My CoCo system is a CoCo3, 512kb, MPI with PAL upgrade and DIsto SCII
controller with DW3/HDB-DOS (from Cloud9) in EPROM. Depending upon my need,
I have Roger's DrivePak and Wireless Serial Pack, SuperIDE, Orch-90, and
SSP. My CoCo3 system works well with a WIntel laptop running DW4 or DW3
under WinXP and on an older iMac (G4) using he OSX version of DW3.

My DriveWire cable is not one the 'turbo' configurations currently being
discussed, I purchased it from Cloud9 along with my original copy of
DriveWire 2.0


The Raspberry Pi system is a Raspberry Pi Model B, Revision 2.0

8gb SD card with NOOBS 1.2

LB-Link Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n USB adapter with antenna,

Powered 4 -port USB mini-hub

USB to DB9 serial adapter.

I chose these specific devices as they are recognized "out of the box" ands
it appears that no additional drivers (beyond what is already in the O/S).
The pertinent output of the lsusb command shows:

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 1a86:7523 QinHeng Electronics HL-340 USB-Serial
adapter

Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05e3:0608 Genesys Logic, Inc. USB-2.0 4-Port HUB

Bus 001 Device 008: ID 0bda:8176 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8188CUS
802.11n WLAN Adapter


I installed the Raspian O/S (based upon the Wheezy version of Debian) from
the NOOBs 1.2 release, The output of the uname command shows:

Linux raspberrypi 3.6.11+ #538 PREEMPT Fri Aug 30 20:42:08 BST 2013 armv6l
GNU/Linux


Then I downloaded and installed these packages

apt-file; libswt-cairo-gtk-3-jni; libswt-gtk-3-java and oracle-java7-jdk

I then updated and upgraded all installed packages (apt-get update; apt-get
upgrade)


Then I downloaded the DriveWire zip file and expanded it into
/usr/drivewire.

Now from the LXTerminal window I enter "java -jar DW4UI.jar and I now have
the DW4 GUI "up and running"

I can run the simple configuration and select the correct CoCo, the correct
serial port, etc. One thing that I had to do was to disable browser access,
since the Rasperian browser is not Mozilla, Google or other
more-recognizable application.


I still have several more things to do, but I am pleased that I can (at
least) run the DriveWire 4 GUI on a Raspberry PI. So if things work, I will
have a dedicated, low-cost DW server for my CoCo3.