Hi Peter, thanks for sharing your experiences, very interesting stuff. There also seems to be an ethernet "shield" or a daughterboard module for the Arduino microcontroller platform which is based around the Wiznet W5100 chip which Miguel mentioned. This combination would be an interesting prototyping environment since it has all the ethernet circuitry and a TCP stack out of the box. The only real integration to the QL would be the bus interface electronics between the QL expansion slot and the arduino board, a bit of microcontroller s/w for the QL side, and the card driver which would be a fairly straighforward bit pushing engine because all of the configuration and h/w control is done on the microcontroller.
It's going to be very interesting to try out, there is still a lot to do but it should be good fun :) Cheers, Petri On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Peter <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Petri, > > thanks for sharing your experience with the GBS-8220 video converter. I > have ordered it myself now. The vertical jitter seems common to all > external converter solutions I have seen or heard of. To overcome that > problem we'd probably need a QL specific development. > > A few remarks regarding ethernet: > > If you go for a solution without Microcontroller, I would not recommend > the Microchip ENC28J60, but the Silabs CP2200, which has less power > consumption, and seemed easier and more robust to implement from both > driver and hardware side. I tested both, but this info is about three > years old, so there might be even better chips by now. > > Before you put much work into the hardware, try to make sure what your > goal is on the software side. Eight(?) years ago I implemented a full > multitasking native TCP/IP stack for the QL and ran it on Q40/Q60 with > NE2000-compatible chip. This software called QLwIP (derived from lwIP, > other free software, plus self-written code) provided a full-featured > sockets library which contained enough functionality to actually run > native email, webbrowser, webserver etc. I proved that the above > applications worked in real life, but I did not finish and release my work > because of licensing issues that prevented me from adding that (open > source) code to the (proprietary) operating system SMSQ/E. For a long time > I waited for a Minerva port to the Q40/Q60 so I could complete the job, in > vain. Adding support for the CP2200 IOT support the old QL would be small > in comparison to the overall work already done. > > Nowadays I doubt how much of the knowledge I still have left. So many > years - and I get older :-) Also I doubt wether I still have the time. So > my work is not totally lost, I considered a QLwIP release with QDOS > Classic, but that's a dead end and has severe disadvantages compared with > Minerva. One of them is, that QDOS Classic doesn't run on the QL. > > I conclusion, your approach to run the TCP/IP stack on an external > microcontroller which then allows a simple, stream-oriented approach on > the QL side, seems much more realistic than the ones which involve a > native TCP/IP stack. It might not be very "stylish" to run the stack > outside the QL, but still better than having nothing. > > All the best > Peter > > _______________________________________________ > QL-Users Mailing List > http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm > _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
