[Coco] Just another peek...

[Dave Philipsen]

Yes, I haven't yet investigated whether my Dell computer will reliably 
transfer data that fast over its RS232 port but I'm sure there are ways 
to even get the speed higher than that without Drivewire or the 
CoCo3FPGA even knowing! :)

There are a lot of reasons to use Drivewire and even Gary Becker himself 
told me that he has no real reason to disconnect.  But there are some 
venues where a standalone system is desired.  I'm thinking more along 
the lines of 'embedded' applications.  For instance, if you wanted to do 
home control (lights, appliances, etc.) with the CoCo you probably 
wouldn't want to have to have a PC fired up 24 hours a day for that.  
Or, if you wanted to make a security system for your house, or the list 
goes on...  The CoCo3 FPGA draws maybe 5 watts of power and that's 
pushing it whereas a PC probably draws at least 50-100 watts I would 
imagine, on average.  So leaving the DE1 on 24 hrs. a day for a year 
might cost you 5 bucks a year for electricity whereas a PC might cost 
ten to twenty times that.  However, for occasional use there are many 
advantages to being hooked up to a PC like internet access and printing 
and the like.

Dave Philipsen



On 2015-10-09 19:20, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> FWIW, you can run Drivewire at 460kbps with the coco3fpga, which is 
> nice
> but still not as fast as a local disk.  It pushes the limits of usable
> performance though (at 460k, you are usually waiting on something other
> than disk access :)
> 
> On Fri, Oct 9, 2015, 7:59 PM Dave Philipsen <dave at davebiz.com> wrote:
> 
>> Oh and, by the way, I'm definitely not knocking drivewire.  It 
>> certainly
>> has its place and its functions are much more than just a 'disk
>> controller' but the SD card on the CoCo3FPGA is an order of magnitude
>> faster than drivewire running at 115.2kbps.  And rightfully so as its
>> SPI interface is running at a frequency that is an order of magnitude
>> higher than a typical serial port. It is especially noticable when
>> you're doing disk intensive operations like assembling or compiling
>> programs.
>> 
>> 
>> Dave
>> 
>>