In message <001c01cbc23b$b4caf510$1e60df30$@acanthis.co.uk>, Adrian Ives
<adr...@acanthis.co.uk> writes
Hi Adrian,
Yes, using the USBWiz is a good idea.
A new hardware project always creates interest.
PS - This list is getting very busy, too.
Just catching up on over 100 emails ... :-)
I have no idea if anyone is remotely interested in this project to attach
USB devices to a QL using a small card called a USBWiz. This device
presents a serial interface and accepts AT style commands to communicate
with many classes of USB device. I started working on this last year, but
was delayed by some family problems and a move to another part of the
country. My prototype hardware is a little black block that connects via a
serial lead to a QL or Hermes serial port. The box has an SD card slot and
two USB ports.
In the past two weeks I have turned my original prototype driver inside out
(not a trivial task, no wonder I missed an errant "me equ 0" statement). The
first version suffered from problems encountered when trying to do serial
I/O while in supervisor mode (in effect, a driver on top of a driver).
Today I successfully completed a test which involved writing a text file to
a native QDOS format SD card, then reading it back again.
The new driver switches to user mode to do asynchronous I/O over the
standard serial port driver through an I/O queue which is managed by a Queue
Manager job. In this it is very different from other device drivers and so
will need a lot more testing. Not the least of which under QDOS as the
driver has been developed under SMSQ. The framework is also in place to
support real time communication with the driver core through a pipe
mechanism. This is intended to allow queries to be sent to the driver, as
opposed to its devices; a variation on a paper that I read about the
possibility of implementing meta devices on the QL. Some time in the future
I envisage a USB "thing" to act as the interface to this feature.
Anyway, that's where I am.
The new device driver has the name USB; USB1 is the SD card slot, USB2 and
USB3 are the ports which can mount standard external hard drives or memory
sticks. It reads and writes, but the format routine still needs completing
(formatting is currently done with a S*BASIC utility)
As well as the native QL driver I also have a File Manager which needs no
driver (only a free serial port) and can read and write FAT format SD cards
and USB hard drives. This software also supports the automatic saving and
retrieving of the QDOS 64 byte header. This program currently runs in
menu-driven character mode, but it is my intention to migrate it to a GD2
compliant pointer app in the very near future.
So, my question is this: Is anyone actually interested in me devoting more
time to finish this project? If (and it is still an if) the driver can be
brought to a release-stable state, is there interest in a commercial product
based around this?
--
Malcolm Cadman
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