[Simh] Physical serial ports and SIMH

[Jordi Guillaumes i Pons]

Perhaps you will want to consider one alternative to the Raspberry Pi: 

http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone%20Black

I have got one. It is noticeabily faster than the pi (it clocks at 1GHz and uses a faster memory) and it does not need a SD card to boot (it has 2GB of on-board flash). I run debian wheezy in mine, and of course simh compiles without any problem once you have installed the dependencies. It comes with 5 UARTs and you can get a "cape" which gets you a standard RS232 port thru a D9 connector:

http://circuitco.com/support/index.php?title=BeagleBone_RS232

(I am not sure if you can stack several capes to use the other UARTs).




El 26/06/2013, a les 21:41, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> va escriure:

> On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 1:17 PM, Brian Knittel <brian at quarterbyte.com> wrote:
>> Hi Gregg,
>> 
>> This is an interest of mine too, for some personal and some work
>> projects.
>> 
>> The RPi usees 3.3V logic, so you have to use a level-shifting chip to
>> use the hardware UARTs with RS-232 or RS-4xx. I've had an RS-232/RPi
>> interface sitting on the dining room table half put-together for the
>> last 2 months, so I can't tell you yet how well it works.
>> 
>> Re: the USB to RS-232 interface options (most of which, AFAIK, use the
>> FTDI chip built into a cable), I have read online accounts of
>> instability in the Raspbian drivers -- the interfaces work for a few
>> minutes or hours, and then stop working. If true, that makes them
>> functionally worthless.
>> 
>> I'd be very interested to hear if anyone has had this experience, or
>> has found a USB/RS-232 cable/driver combo that has proven to be stable
>> on the RPi.
>> 
>> Brian
>> 
>> 
>> On 26 Jun 2013 at 11:01, Gregg Levine wrote:
>> 
>> Hello!
>> Right now I am tooling up to try out an idea or two concerning the
>> PDP-11 emulation. This is to be run on a Raspberry Pi running the
>> latest release of their Raspberry specific Debian release. (Also fully
>> updated and upgraded.)
>> 
>> The device has the two USB connections ostensibly for a keyboard and
>> mouse, but one gentleman I know managed to make use of the serial port
>> function on one of them, and attached a USB to serial adapter to one
>> of the connections. So obviously I can connect two adapters to the two
>> ports there.
>> 
>> But what about the serial port embedded on the GPIO connectors? Can I
>> make use of that one?
>> 
>> I know normally that SIMH emulates a chosen computer and only fairly
>> recently with some of them do communicate with the outside world via
>> Ethernet, but for what I'm planning and working on, it seems to be a
>> good fit. Should it work I might be able to upscale the working
>> programs to Mr Wilson's product running on an X86 board instead, or
>> even an actual PDP-11 model.....
>> -----
>> Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
>> "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
>> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
>> _| _| _|  Brian Knittel
>> _| _| _|  Quarterbyte Systems, Inc.
>> _| _| _|  Tel: 1-510-559-7930
>> _| _| _|  http://www.quarterbyte.com
> 
> Hello!
> Interesting point. As it happens FTDI makes a module that adds things
> to the based Raspberry Pi, here:
> http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/Modules/RPi.htm they basically there
> explain everything imaginable for the module itself. I suspect based
> on what you've stated there's still some unstability in the drivers
> that the modules are creating, and, ah, its supposed to be fixed using
> the library they describe on an app note, and of course its available
> for all forms of Linux.
> 
> -----
> Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
> "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
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Jordi Guillaumes i Pons
jg at jordi.guillaumes.name
HECnet: BITXOV::JGUILLAUMES