Yeah, I am not aware of any modules that actually pass the handshaking
beyond high-end industrial converters. That would likely need to be
serial over wifi as the bluetooth serial protocol just doesn't have this
built in. I also have a pair of those, but they are around $95 a piece
and not small. You might be able to do it with ESP32s.
Thankfully I don't need handshaking for the robots. They only have TX
and RX.
Scott
On 10/1/2025 6:23 PM, Stephen Adolph wrote:
I'll add a comment.
I would make sure the modules support hardware handshaking fornlocal
flow control.
These Bluetooth dongles don't at all actually emulate a wire. The
flow of bytes is very different and you might find applications like
tsdos suffer from timeouts and other problems arising from buffer
overflows.
Another good feature would be to have the dongle obey software flow
control.
Good luck. I've played around with Bluetooth in the past with mixed
results. I wanted to have wireless connectivity to a nadsbox or
online laddiealpha folder. Never got it to work well.
Cheers
Steve
On Wednesday, October 1, 2025, Dave Everett <[email protected]>
wrote:
Certainly more expensive, they used to be $11 each and they were
rock solid. I will need to order a set of the ones from Amazon and
give them a go.
Dave
On Wed, 1 Oct 2025 at 5:32 pm, Scott McDonnell
<[email protected]> wrote:
They look like expensive versions of the HC-12 modules.
https://www.amazon.com/433Mhz-Wireless-Replace-Bluetooth-Antenna/dp/B0C7M99BQM
<https://www.amazon.com/433Mhz-Wireless-Replace-Bluetooth-Antenna/dp/B0C7M99BQM>
On 9/30/2025 9:08 PM, Dave Everett wrote:
Check out the description for these:
https://ebay.us/m/drkr36
Dave
On Wed, 1 Oct 2025 at 11:04, Scott McDonnell
<[email protected]> wrote:
1200 baud seems to be the most reliable. 9600 is
possible, though.
On 9/30/2025 8:50 PM, Dave Everett wrote:
What was the max baud rate for the m100? I regularly use
transceiver modules that do ttl rs-232. They run at 9600
but from memory that can be changed. I just don’t recall
if it can go lower.
Dave
On Wed, 1 Oct 2025 at 08:50, Scott McDonnell
<[email protected]> wrote:
I plan to dedicate one of my Model 100s to use as a
controller for my
80s robots.
These are my planned mods to implement this:
1. Internal retro wifi modem (oldnet.com
<http://oldnet.com>)
I plan to make hack onto the MC14412 chip. I
have no plan to
retain the original modem functionality, but if I
did, I am thinking I
could implement this via the modem enable signal.
That would also allow
me to control power to the ESP8266 so that it did
not drain the battery
when not in use. I could bring the enable line out
to a switch to
reconnect the enable line to the MC14412. At the
moment, I can't really
think of why I might ever want the original modem.
I will use a Wemos D1 mini with an external antenna
that I will attach
to the M100 body.
2. Complete my originally idea to port the TPDDuino
project to the
sparkfun openlog hardware and make this internal
Here, I am thinking the BCR TTL serial mod
would be appropriate.
This frees up the serial port which I will need for
the robot control.
Not sure if TSDOS already supports this, however.
There could could be
some benefits to the faster speed possible with the
BCR hack.
3. Wireless serial
For this, I have not decided whether to use
bluetooth or an HC-12
module. This will be in an external modules so that
I can use the serial
port for other purposes. I do plan to add a fused 5V
output to pin 25 of
the serial port. This was a common pin to use back
in the day for adding
a power output. It doesn't appear to be connected to
ground in the M100
per the schematics, but I will need to double-check.
4. Joystick mod mentioned previously
If I will be using the BCR port for the
TPPDuino, then I will end
up implementing the ideas discussed in that thread
for using the
parallel port. But I also might just hack into the
keyboard matrix
arrows since this will be dedicated for this
purpose. Still weighing
this while I work on the other mods.
-----------------------
Interested in internal battery hacks. I have been
thinking of installing
a 7.2V nimh pack. I am not really sure it could fit
anywhere inside, though.
While looking through old magazines, I had seen
products that were
available at the time which were battery packs that
also doubled as tilt
stands. I liked the look of those and might end up
3-D printing
something like that. There was a simpler project to
use a PVC pipe with
D cell batteries and the author fashioned that to
also act as a tilt stand.
For my first M100, I had modified a book light to
attach to the BCR port
to provide light for the LCD. I wasn't especially
happy with it as the
clear plastic bezel is too glossy and reflected too
much of the light. I
feel like if there were any possible enhancement
here, it would need to
be some sort of front light mounted internally. This
is probably outside
of how much effort I want to put into this.
Interested in hearing about any experience and
efforts into trying to
improve the readability of the LCD.
