[Coco] WiFi modem.

[Allen Huffman]

> On Jan 19, 2018, at 12:20 PM, RETRO Innovations <go4retro at go4retro.com> wrote:
> 
> Technical details would be nice on this, as the 6551, properly wired, does 230K just fine, including flow control.  The Commodore community has does this for year, and I replicated the functionality for 230K into the 6551 cart I designed.  I even added Sockmaster's auto-RTS and such tweaks on the board.

IF we do want a new Pak designed as an RS232 replacement, we have some good options.

1) Inside the pak could be a connector with a TTL signal and the appropriate power for an HC-05/06 Bluetooth module. The CoCo could connect to PCs, Macs, etc. via Bluetooth.

2) With the proper connection, an ESP8266 could be plugged up in a similar way. With special CoCo software, it could do up to 4 socket connections at a time, UDP and all of that. But that takes lots of CoCo work. OR, reflash the 8266 with the ZIMODEM and it acts as an internet WiFi Hayes modem! I did this, and just did ADTsomebbs.com:700 and boom, I was there. Uploads, downloads, etc. would work just fine. The firmware handles telnet protocol, or has a raw mode, which we could use for creating HTTPGET type utilities to pull disk images or web pages off the ‘Net.

3) The ESP32 is a few bucks more, but it is WiFi *AND* Bluetooth on one board, plus can run custom code, has I/O, and lots of other things — you can use it like an Arduino (8266 does that too) and create custom code for it.

4) Using the basic TTL level plug, you could also plug in any standard USB-TTL cable and then hook a CoCo up to a PC via a wire — PC sees it as a COM port, CoCO sees it via RS232 pak.

#3 would be superb, since there’s extra I/O pins and such that could be brought out for hooking up other things we might want. Like the $3 sound boards and such..........

And this is all really, really cheap.

		— A