[Coco] Arduino DriveWire server

[Michael Furman]

This does not surprise me, especially if the Arduino libraries are being used. I did an experiment running Arduino code on an ESP8266 board and the serial io performance was dismal.  I investigated the details of those libraries there is a pretty sophisticated I/O abstraction layer that closely resembles POSIX.  It makes certain code easier to write but if you need the ultimate performance this stuff tends to get in the way.  For an Arduino probably writing C to directly talk to the UART and process the UART's interrupts would probably help.  Its possible that the UART just can't go that fast.

I'm sure Boisy will give us his project eventually, but even so I have been working on my own non-Java-but-not-C DriveWire4 server.  I could probably reproduce a C version in a few weeks, DriveWire 3 compatibility is essentially a trivial thing to code up, the DriveWire 4 virtual modem/networking stuff is a bit harder but also not that hard once you understand how it works.  

I think that ESP8266 is a better platform simply because it's newer and higher performance and its libraries are lower level and get in the way less than Arduino.

--
Michael R. Furman
Email: n6il at ocs.net
Phone: +1 (408) 480-5865

> On Jun 18, 2016, at 4:53 AM, Barry Nelson <barry.nelson at amobiledevice.com> wrote:
> 
> I have inquired about this before and not gotten a response, so I am trying again. I understand that Boisy has ported DriveWire to an Arduino and got it to run but had issues with it running serially at standard baud rates above 57600. I would like to get a copy of the Arduino source code. My thought is if the Arduino won't do 115200 baud, maybe the code on the CoCo side could be adjusted to do a baud rate that the Arduino will do. Other possibilities include hooking the Arduino to an UART chip like a 16550 and have the 16550 generate the serial I/O since it has it's own timing. This could yield a small compact and inexpensive DriveWire server that could be easily used with a real CoCo or the CoCo 3 FPGA.
> 
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