[Coco] The BIGGEST PROBLEM with (So-Called) NEW CoCo Hardware...

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 05 March 2017 11:21:40 Dave Philipsen wrote:

> On 3/5/2017 9:38 AM, Allen Huffman wrote:
> > On Mar 5, 2017, at 9:21 AM, Bill Gunshannon 
<bill.gunshannon at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >> 4.  Putting USB on the COCO would be expensive and not particularly
> >> practical.  Of course, you can print to anything automatically thru
> >> a PC using DRIVEwire, so that is already a done deal.
> >
> > Myth.
> >
> > Take a $5 Raspberry Pi zero, which has USB host, and interface it's
> > Digital IO pins to the CoCO bus, and now you can use anything it can
> > use.
> >
> > But the Pi is Linux and that sucks because it takes ages to boot so
> > that really would be a lousy interface ;)
>
> You are kidding about the boot time on the Pi being slow, right?  My
> Pi boots faster than my Windows 7 computer! I think if you worked at
> it you could trim some of the unnecessary junk and get the Pi to boot
> even faster (maybe under 10 seconds).
>
My $35 pi 3b, albeit bigger & faster than the zero, boots a full blown 
debian (8) jessie install, ready to run linuxcnc in about 40 seconds, 
reading the code serially from a 32Gb micro-sd card. On that one, I am 
user pi and I'm automatically logged in at boot time.

I don't have an x86 box that can match that.

> > A universal all-in-one USB interface that is fast booting is
> > trickier, but having a Serial Pak that is USB, or a USB Mouse
> > interface, or other dedicated packs is cheap. Heck, you code have
> > one pack with four USB ports on it, one for serial, one for MIDI,
> > one for.... and that would still be cheap. :)


Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
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