The Sinclair QL Forum

It's been a slow and unproductive week. Mostly, because a large limb of a neighbor's tree fell on my house in a storm. I've been clearing up the damage and making things habitable again - luckily it was the garage portion of the roof that got whacked.

So, I am one week behind now.

Meanwhile, is there any demand for an internal wifi/bluetooth upgrade for existing QLs? It would be limited to the QL's internal serial port, but it would work.

Hi Dave

I was thinking about your request for interest in the WiFi/BT for native QL and my answer would depend upon the availability of drivers/SW to make use of it.

Would the TCP/IP stack run on a native QL?
Would it require or take advantage of Hermes (my QLs are all fitted with Hermes v1)?
What form-factor/interconnect would you plan for it?

Loving all your new ideas, Dave - thanks for keeping our QL's alive!

I very much doubt a standard QL would have the speed to do TCP/IP at a reasonable speed, it would need some sort of hand-off device doing the leg work.

Trying to use the built-in serial ports at anything more than 300 baud is really out of the question due to the overloaded keyboard chip doing the receive. (I know this from the days when I wrote a terminal emulator and tried to use it with the Uni's mini-computers. Constant data loss if there's typing and worse if there's a beep involved.)

So, what you'd need would be a simple dedicated network processor (Arduino?) and a proper serial UART with a largish buffer. The QL would then interface with the serial chip using a simple protocol.

The card would run the TCP stack for you. You access it like a Hayes modem, tell it what IP you want to connect to, etc. It supports encryption for you too, and it would be programmable in its own right to extend its functionality. It has a dozen or so GPIO pins, dual core CPU and a good chunk of RAM. The idea is it would be a good low cost dev platform to build a software base for the QL.

It could either be plugged into a serial port (external power supply) or could plug into the 8302/8049 sockets. It would use the inbuilt serial port for the first version, but later would have its own serial port that was an order of magnitude faster.

That works for me and opens the possibility of some general purpose I/O as well.

I am interested. Any idea of eventual cost?

M.

Dave wrote:The card would run the TCP stack for you. You access it like a Hayes modem, tell it what IP you want to connect to, etc. It supports encryption for you too, and it would be programmable in its own right to extend its functionality. It has a dozen or so GPIO pins, dual core CPU and a good chunk of RAM. The idea is it would be a good low cost dev platform to build a software base for the QL.

It could either be plugged into a serial port (external power supply) or could plug into the 8302/8049 sockets. It would use the inbuilt serial port for the first version, but later would have its own serial port that was an order of magnitude faster.

Hi Dave,

So I could connect my old BBS system without any changes to the Modem initialisation strings.

I was going to do this via a Raspberry PI as gateway, but was stuck on multi-line access, but maybe only a sinlge log-in would be sufficient.

MartynHill wrote:That works for me and opens the possibility of some general purpose I/O as well.

I am interested. Any idea of eventual cost?

M.

A serial port version would come in around £40. An internal version would be technically cleaner and be around £60?

Wild guess.

Derek_Stewart wrote:

Dave wrote:The card would run the TCP stack for you. You access it like a Hayes modem, tell it what IP you want to connect to, etc. It supports encryption for you too, and it would be programmable in its own right to extend its functionality. It has a dozen or so GPIO pins, dual core CPU and a good chunk of RAM. The idea is it would be a good low cost dev platform to build a software base for the QL.

It could either be plugged into a serial port (external power supply) or could plug into the 8302/8049 sockets. It would use the inbuilt serial port for the first version, but later would have its own serial port that was an order of magnitude faster.

Hi Dave,

So I could connect my old BBS system without any changes to the Modem initialisation strings.

I was going to do this via a Raspberry PI as gateway, but was stuck on multi-line access, but maybe only a sinlge log-in would be sufficient.

It will work well with that type of software. You just need to work out the hayes initialisation string to receive incoming connections and send them to a particular logical port on the ESP card. It's quite straightforward and you'd probably work out the right solution for you in around 5 minutes.