Comment by burstmode
1 day ago
Does it emulate RS232 ports and printer ports as well ? I did'nt find anything. Then it would be possible to reuse old embedded equipment.
1 day ago
Does it emulate RS232 ports and printer ports as well ? I did'nt find anything. Then it would be possible to reuse old embedded equipment.
No, it doesn't.
Also this doesn't emulate ISA bus, where one could plug one of those "multi-io" cards to get rs232/printer ports.
Which is a shame. There are plenty of GPIO pins to fit full ISA on RP2350 (at least on "B" variant), and those GPIO are supposedly 5V-tolerant (with sufficiently recent silicon revision). So hardware-wise, it's just a matter of wiring up an ISA slot directly to the RP chip.
This could be useful on its own to create an ISA-over-USB bridge in conjunction with either a kernel driver or a user-mode PC emulator.
it would be awesome if there was an ISA bus emulation using some sort of modern protocol. You could create "modern" ISA cards using an RP2350 on every card that does the emulation, to split emulation between multiple RP2350's (one emulates a VGA card, one emulates a sound card, one emulates a network card, etc.)
Bonus points for a standardized connector that everyone could develop towards. Imagine a tiny ISA PC that you could place on your desktop, swap miniscule (ISA)-cards in and out of, and play retro games etc.
"Modern" tiny ISA would probably be LPC [0] which is a relatively simple encapsulation/serialization format for ISA that preserve full software compatibility, and can transport ISA signals over as few as 8 pins.
This thing was quite ubiquitous for inter-connecting some low-speed things within PC motherboards in the early 2000s. Although physically separate LPC cards did exits, those were rare and connector/pinout was never standardized.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Pin_Count_bus
> Then it would be possible to reuse old embedded equipment.
Unlikely, virtualization/emulation has been a thing well before this project and you can just buy USB to RS232 adapters. There are GPIO solutions for industrial PCs other than the parallel port. Or you can simply buy new industrial PCs which have those ports.
If you find an industrial appliance controlled by genuine old PC hardware that hasn't been replaced, the RS232 ports are the least of your concerns.
In my experience, such machines usually have something insanely proprietary plugging into a custom ISA card, and whatever is connected to it usually doesn't take too kindly if the bus timings are off. And neither does the accompanying bare metal software that relies heavily on timing loops and hardware peculiarities.
I've been holding on to a couple of fanless industrial PCs as much for their cases (I could drive my truck over one, and it wouldn't even make a dent) as for any possible future uses. As time moves on, being able to use them looks less and less likely.