QL Ethernet expansion card project

[ppe]

Hi everyone,

thought I would post this here as well in case someone is not on the QL users email list.

I just managed to finish a second prototype of an ethernet expansion card for the QL with an onboard TCP/IP chip. There's a picture here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/petrip/6883064083/

The TCP/IP module is the WizNet W5300 and I'm using the prototyping breakout board called WIZ830MJ. It can handle eight simultaneous socket connections and has 128kbytes of socket buffer memory. More details can be found here: http://www.wiznet.co.kr/sub_modules/en/ ... 5&pid=1012

Now that I have a working prototype available I can start putting together the software side of things. There's a rather rudimentary socket driver available for the WizNet chip and I was planning to use it to create a very simplistic HTTP client that could be used to e.g. download files to the QL. If that goes well then next steps would probably be a more comprehensive networking library that ideally should be compatible with the existing socket library. And then maybe a Twitter client

At some point I would also like to design a proper PCB based version so that if someone wants one they can easily build it...

Cheers,
Petri

[vanpeebles]

Looks impressive! Superb work

[thorsinclair]

Compliments, this is fantastic ! Best of success for your project and please keep us informed. There is a lot of movement in the QL hardware development - great! We have SD cards and USB hardware, various QL clones under development ... I'm happy to see that so many talented people is around here!

[RWAP]

That is really good news indeed - let's hope the software is not TOO much of a problem.

The main problem with a twitter client is that it will soon need to use HTTPS protocol and authentication, which is a real pain!

[ppe]

Hi everyone and thanks for the encouraging words.

Just a quick update: just created and ran a standalone DNS client successfully through the card which means that UDP works bidirectionally. Happy days Next small test is a bare-bones NTP client to sync QL clock with an external time server.

[RWAP]

Great news - keep up the good work...

[ppe]

Another update: just implemented an NTP client and was actually able to set the QL time (correctly) over network, yay. Baby steps.... No time zone support or any kind of configuration support yet, though. It's all prototyping.

Now that I'm quite happy that UDP works and have something useful implemented over it I'm going to tackle TCP next. I'm thinking of some kind of HTTP client so I can e.g. fetch files from my PC.

Cheers,
Petri

[IanJ]

Another update: just implemented an NTP client and was actually able to set the QL time (correctly) over network, yay. Baby steps.... No time zone support or any kind of configuration support yet, though. It's all prototyping.

Now that I'm quite happy that UDP works and have something useful implemented over it I'm going to tackle TCP next. I'm thinking of some kind of HTTP client so I can e.g. fetch files from my PC.

Cheers,
Petri

Petri,

I am quite interested in building up your ethernet card.......would you be interested in sharing the design and code. I've been looking for a way to build a QL based web server just for fun.

Ian
www.ianjohnston.com

[vanpeebles]

Welcome Ian, you are our 200th user!!!

[Dave]

Welcome Ian.

ppe's ethernet card is the Wiznet 5300 IC and a simple decoder. He hasn't made any real progress on a driver. There is possibly hardware coming on the UltraQBoard that may incorporate this chip.

Without drivers, nothing will happen.

If anyone is interested in writing drivers for the WizNet WS5300 (or the 5500 SPI version) Nasta and me should be of some assistance.