Re: ADTPro on Raspberry Pi

[BLuRry <brendan.robert@gmail.com>]

On Sunday, January 6, 2013 7:37:58 PM UTC-6, Paul Hagstrom wrote:
> By the way, seeing the commentary about the work on the virtual serial 
> 
> host, I was inspired to try again to run ADTPro on the Raspberry Pi 
> 
> (I'd tried once before and it didn't work properly, and I gave up 
> 
> immediately).  Trying again, I got it to work pretty quickly.  And, no 
> 
> (new) engineering magic necessary.
> 
> 
> 
> I'll try to do it over from scratch so I can put down the exacty steps, 
> 
> but basically with the default Debian Wheezy installation, I just neded 
> 
> to download the proper drivers for my Keyspan 28X serial-to-USB 
> 
> converter, install Java 8, install the rxtx library (with apt-get) and 
> 
> move the proper binary into the "unknown Linux" directory, edit a 
> 
> little bit of the startup script to point to the proper location for 
> 
> java, startx, and launch.
> 
> 
> 
> I encountered no problems once it was running, though my testing so far 
> 
> has only been connecting it to a IIc Plus, sending over the VDRIVE 
> 
> image to make a floppy, and then saving and loading back a binary file 
> 
> from the attached virtual drive.  But it works, pretty much out of the 
> 
> box.  So, with a reliable battery power source for the RasPi and some 
> 
> kind of headless setup, it could be probably made into a pretty simple 
> 
> and easily acquired mass storage device.
> 
> 
> 
> Nice!  (And thanks, David, for making it so easy!)

If ADT Pro could be used sans GUI, it might be possible to make a $40 Raspi into a headless serial disk server.  This would be very competitively priced compared to more special-purpose solutions (which are also very awesome).  It shouldn't be that difficult to get Java to talk to native libraries (via JNI) to control the GPIO pins (say, a couple of pushbuttons to switch images and maybe a small LCD to tell you what you're using currently.)

-B