On 11/16/20 2:07 PM, The CopyPenguin wrote:
It works just fine both ways with LaddieAlpha on my Mac,
Given that John H. wrote Laddie and I know he added specific WP-2 support to dlplus, I am not surprised Laddie supports WP-2 fully.
dlplus works too (thanks John). I haven't actually tried it myself, but TechTangents did. ;) I was amused at his reaction when he described discovering dlplus and saying "...and it was last updated...pause...3 days ago!? Wow."
PDDuino definitely does NOT work yet. I made up a WP-2 version of Feather MounT so the hardware is ready to go, and I did try that. Not even close. Immediate hang.
But since dlplus works and I have it to look at, I expect I'll be able to get PDDuino working too.
Though that still leaves a power problem. An arduino board running a tpdd emulator needs a power supply. If I use the Adafruit Feather (vs Teensy) I can use it's built-in lipo manager and a small cell, and charge it up by usb occasionally*.
Otherwise, the card slot provides 5v, so I could also make an IC Card that has a usb port like I did for the BCR port on a 100/8201/etc. I might possibly even be able to make that card not terribly ungainly. They do make fancy special case usb ports that mount right in the middle of a cutout in a pcb, or soldered flat to it, etc. Might possibly be able to make it so the card doesn't have a big honking lumpy not-flat component sticking out on the end.
* Using a lipo cell instead of tapping the WP-2 itself really would not be a terribly inconvenient solution I think. The PDDuino rig idles at about 3ma while turned on but otherwise idle waiting for TPDD traffic. The smallest 105mah cell would still last something like 35 hours of run time. If you were a professional writer, that's almost a whole work week on a single chage using the smallest cell you can buy, even if you got up, turned it on, worked 8 hours, and turned it off, every day. And that's a tiny quad-copter cell. The next larger cell is 150mah and hardly any larger, a 350mah cell is still small enough to still stick right onto the board. And even if you had a situation where the cell was dead, and you wanted to take the machine out away from home *right now*, a few minutes of charging would get you hours of run time, so, you really would have to work to contrive a situation where you're actually materially frustrated by the inability to swap in some new batteries on the spot rather than waiting for the lipo to charge up by usb. Like you're about to get on a 12 hour international flight and have no other means to charge it on the go (like no usb power bank or wall plug for your phone. really, today you're not going to have a way to keep your phone alive? ok sure) and no time to charge it enough to last 12 hours, and you need it to actually be turned on the whole time for the entire next 12 hours... yeah ok sure, it could happen :)
But all in all I'm thinking the internal 128K ramdisk is all anyone really needs in real life. It's 128K, powered by the 2430 coin cell, survives not only power loss but hard resets, costs $5 or so, is a single part you don't have to solder or assemble, and takes up no room since it lives inside the machine. The 2430 cells are not hard to find. Just type CR2430 into amazon or google and they are available new and cheap. You by a card of 5 or 6, install one, stick another in the pocket in the slip case, and you're set for "ever". I don't know why everyone makes such a big deal about that battery. I have links to a few different current sources for different compatible ram chips on tandy.wiki/WP-2. Basically everyone can have that 128K internal ram disk. Right from DigiKey or Mouser or Farnell etc, not even resorting to ebay.
And if someone really does need more space than the internal 128K, then a 128K card (now that it exists) probably makes more sense than a TPDD emulator. It's so much less complicated. No cpu, no program, no forest of parts, just a plain single ram chip and a couple dirt simple parts. It's smaller, packs better, flat, right in the WP-2 slip case, and the project to build the card is roughly equal to building the Feather MounT. You buy the Adafruit Feather board already built, but then you still need to build the serial port adapter (the WP-2 version of Feather MounT), and that is about the same number of parts and about the same difficulty as building the IC Card. The most difficult part is soldering a TSOP chip. The legs are really tiny and you just need good magnification, light, and lots of flux. But building the MounT board has a few parts that are almost as fiddly. Nothing as tiny as TSOP legs though.
The only real down side to using the IC Card for storage vs tpdd is you can't move it over to an M100 or a pc to read the files directly. If you were storing files on a pdduino, you could move that same pdduino rig from the WP-2 over to a M100 or 8201. Or you could eject the microsd card and read it directly in a pc card reader or in another pdduino rig. The files on a WP-2 IC Card are pretty much only accessable by the WP-2 itself. You only move files to anything else by serial cable.
-- bkw
