Adrian D. Ives wrote, On 28/10/09 17:15:
Tony,
I have put a request into Crownhill asking for some technical
documentation and will do some investigations of my own. If possible,
It would be nice to have a design that didn't require other hardware
to be present in the QL, besides the obligatory glue.
As for the driver, I don't know the current hard disk drivers in any
detail, but at some point I assume they must make an IO call to
get/set a specific sector or block (or range of sectors/blocks), so
that's where I would start looking for opportunities to reuse the
existing code.
I suppose the ideal situation might be that there are USBWiz commands
to read and store a numbered logical block. Then you *might* be able
replace the code in the existing drivers that communicates with the
ATA controller, with some glue code that communicates with the USBWiz
instead. That has to be a starting point.
I know I'm greatly over-simplifying things here, and probably talking
bollocks, but it seems possible to me. In any event, it's an
interesting discussion to have.
Indeed. It seemed at a very quick look in the manual, thta they had
made the serial communication *vry* straightforward.
The only obvious silly aspect of the hardware design is that there is
serial but no RS232 voltages.
It needs a Maxim style chip. superHermes uses such a chip. It would need
to use the QLs +-12v as well.
Mind you I got away with using TTL using a Diablo daisy wheel terminal
with a QL, way back in 1985 or so.
I think '-12' works at anything less than .2v or so.
That was out only though and very slow baud rate of 300.
To get 460800 is a totally different game (8-)#
You are very welcome to have my two USBwiz, or are you a software man only?
I guess if someone was looking at the software I might find time to make
up a circuit.
Tony
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