[Coco] Tcp off-loading on CoCo

[Aaron Wolfe]

There are options like the "Adafruit Feather M0 WiFi - ATSAMD21 +
ATWINC1500":  https://www.adafruit.com/product/3010

That is only one example.. I've used a few variations on this theme of
"some arduino compatible processor" + "some wifi chip".   This one
does support TLS, SSL, and afaik all the modern things.

Since all of these boards are (mostly) compatible via open source
libraries etc, the same control software would work on several
devices, maybe with small changes but most of this is abstracted out
by networking and serial I/o libraries etc.

You could implement a standard (or non standard, if it helps) serial
port on a few IO pins and talk to the coco via bitbanger, or better
use SPI onto the coco bus somehow, or anything really.  Then you'd
have communication between whatever code you're running on the
arduino-like cpu and the coco, and the same processor can use network
library calls and do the SSL etc for you.

I don't know where you (or anyone lol :) draws the line between whats
a network card and whats another computer, but the arduino + network
chip idea would be instant on, or very nearly.  Plus it wouldn't tie
you to one chipset or board... still kind of one "family" but there
are options at least.

$0.02
-Aaron

On Sun, Apr 9, 2017 at 11:53 AM, Brett Gordon <beretta42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Modern internet pretty much will require TLS and oauth for the coco to do
> anything internet related (twitter,gmail,fb,  etc.).   This would seem to
> make tcp offloaders like wiznet, or esp8266 less desirable?  I'm finding
> plain tcp has limitations:  many inet services pretty much require a secure
> and authenticated connection.