[Coco] SD Card reader/writer or USB

[Bill Nobel]

This is exactly what I am talking about myself,  SPI or I2c could be easily implemented into Coco thru a micro controller on the bus either through serial or digital on a protocol.

Bill Nobel
 
> On Oct 8, 2014, at 11:13 PM, Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Oct 9, 2014 12:49 AM, <nickma2 at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Drivewire is also a groundbreaking product although a shift from
>> Serial to USB may be needed one day since serial is no longer found on
>> computers.
>> 
>> I wonder, with the required voltage conversions, is it possible to
>> make the bitbanger serial port act like a USB port?
>> 
>> May open the door for other USB devices as well such as USB drives and
>> mice.
> 
> There are a few things that come to mind here.
> 
> As for changing DW to "use usb", in the practical sense it already does
> since usb serial dongles are readily available and cheap.  Many newer
> devices that have a usb port on them (most ham radios with a "usb"
> connection for example) just have a usb serial adapter built inside them,
> so the mechanism is still a current one.  Serial I/O is still a very
> reasonable way to communicate even in our modern era.
> 
> So cheap adapters solve the problem of using something that doesn't have
> built in serial but does have usb (many modern PCs, rasperry pi, etc) as a
> server.  Another alternative is a Bluetooth serial adapter, which lets you
> use things like most any android phone or tablet as the drivewire server.
> Realistically I don't think there is a need to use something different for
> a connection via the bitbanger since ultimately the bitbanger will always
> be a serial device.
> 
> On the other hand, thinking beyond what drivewire does and on to allowing
> the coco to communicate with USB devices itself is a good idea.  USB is
> actually a fairly complex protocol and interfacing with it would mean tying
> a controller to the coco that is probably more powerful in many ways than
> the coco itself, but that's a bridge many of us have already crossed and
> made peace with.  It would probably make more sense to use the coco bus
> rather than the bitbanger for such an interface.
> 
> Going a step further, what if you could add not only USB, but also Ethernet
> and an SD card reader at the same time? Stick a raspberry pi in a rompak,
> figure out an interface to the bus (SPI?) and you've got a whole world of
> modern I/o options.  But, you've also got an entire computer that's many
> times more powerful than the coco acting as your I/O processor.   There are
> precedents in computing,  for example the big iron mainframes and
> supercomputers often have very powerful computers dedicated to I/o, and
> even commodore 64 disk drives contained processors at least equal to the
> one in the "computer" if I recall correctly.  But it does start to feel
> weird pretty quickly.  No weirder than using a second pc just for DriveWire
> I suppose, and a lot more functionality.
> 
> Anyway, that'll be $0.02
> 
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