22 Sep
2014
22 Sep
'14
8:07 a.m.
On 9/21/14 6:41 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On and off, I've tried to get some interest going,
but ran into "Can't you make it all through-hole construction? I don't do
SMT." or "Can you also make it peel potatoes?". I got nowhere. I've
got
a little rogue's gallery of prototypes that I've done. I've even shared
code.
Really, no mystery, just some solid work and chin-scratching.
And the argument of how to talk to the thing.
I'll propose Ethernet again, default adr 128.0.0.1, dip switch to set it from
128.0.0.1 to 128.0.0.15 for multiple devices on the net, using three UDP ports
per adapter. Two devices off the top of my head would be floppy/MFM HD and streaming
tape.
You would obviously only talk to one device at a time. PC would be at 128.0.0.16 on a
private un-routable interface (which is why it's 128.0.0.x).
reset/debug, cmd/status, and data.
reset/debug is its own port so that you can stop, reset the thing in the
middle of a transfer
Essentially, USB w/o the hassle of loading drivers (and getting a USB vendor ID) on the
host machine.
UDP rather than TCP to keep the IP stack tiny, and the protocol is all packet state
machine anyway.