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durgadas311 / cpnet-z80

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BlueTooth, CPNET a discussion. #2

Open jayacotton opened 4 years ago

jayacotton commented 4 years ago

In the RC2014 world, there are SIO boards that have FTDI organized pins.

This allows a bluetooth board that emulates FTDI to plug into the port. Thus bluetooth connection on siob. About the only thing you can do with this is make a terminal, or perhaps print out a listing to a bluetooth printer.

The Idea:

What if we could use the bluetooth board to establish a CPNET connection. This would have several advantages over the enet boards.

  1. Cost. The bluetooth board run from about $25 to about $9 each.
  2. Comparable speed to enet.
  3. On many systems there just is no way to connect enet boards, see sc131.

What would it take to make this work.

Surely the snio.spr would require work, and the local server program would also require work.

Might need it to be a windows version only, since many (not all) linux boxes don't have bluetooth i/o. Mine for instance.

We probably will not require the socket layer at all, simply direct serial i/o and an abstraction layer for the protocol.

durgadas311 commented 4 years ago

I do have a CpnetSerialServer.jar which, at least, would be a starting point. We may still need to work out issues on Windows, as the CpnetSocketServer.jar seems to still have problems there.

This code acts as an extension of the client, and can directly access folders on the host. It can also relay over socket connections to remote CpnetSocketServer instances.

Unfortunately, JAVA does not support serial ports natively, so this requires the add-on package RXTX. There may be cleaner solutions.

durgadas311 commented 4 years ago

There is also the FT245R board, which is not bluetooth but does provide a USB link to a host. I have an implementation of SNIOS for that, and plan on adding it to the repository today. https://www.ftdichip.com/Products/ICs/FT245R.htm

jayacotton commented 4 years ago

Since many of these devices can connect to a serial port, it seems to me that a solid working serial connection would be the foundation for USB, BlueTooth, and perhaps WIFI connections to a server.

The extant serial code seems to be all there, and with a little effort we can add the required additional sio driver support. Wondering if it can be done via CP/M punch/reader handler. Well, lets see how others have done it in the past an follow there trail.

jayacotton commented 4 years ago

WRT FT245R , This is really simple on rc2014 style, since there is almost always a siob port.
I could setup a test system in about 5 minutes (maybe tonight) to test it out. Does the local host java code know how to use the usb connection ?

durgadas311 commented 4 years ago

I'm reviewing my FT245R code as we speak. My simulator code for all that has fallen out of date w.r.t. the socket code, as it looked like no one on the Heathkit side was interested. I'm fixing up the CpnetSerialServer code and will be seeing if it still runs.

Both CpnetSocketServer and CpnetSerialServer share a great deal of code, but the font-end of the serial version is different, as it acts as a "server dispatch" for the client, since a serial port only allows you to communicate to a single remote system.

jayacotton commented 4 years ago

There is a serial port driver for bluetooth on windows. Once we get sc131 to run with serial on windows it may be the next logical step to try bluetooth. That would be very interesting.

jayacotton commented 3 years ago

I'd like to get back to this in the fall. I think bluetooth is a good low cost network connection. May not be fast, but will give a minimal connection for rc2014 and friends.