ElectricLab

II was the lucky winner, and I never win anything! I can't wait to tinker with this card. Just last night when I was getting a PEB ready to bring, I noticed that the 32K memory card in it was bad. I think I will be putting the SAMS card in its case instead of worrying about fixing it just now. Ksarul, I think I will have some questions for you regarding this card as well as a hardware project I have in mind.

Also occasionally the Lantronix will get stuck in debug mode and the status light will blink indefinitely, even when you're not loading any pages. I just power cycle it when this happens, which isn't terribly often but does happen. If you're still having issues, I'd suggest (if you haven't already) verifying that your Lantronix is on your network and has an IP address. You should be able to telnet to it on port 9999. For example, my router has a DHCP scope starting at 192.168.0.241 and my Lantronix normally ends up with .248 as its address. From any machine on the network I can do: telnet 192.168.0.248 9999 and can see the menus served up from the Lantronix. If that's working, then I'd look at the serial side as possible culprit.

The model number on the back, beneath the barcode, should be: UDS-10-01. If you see UDS-10-IAP then it is one that has incompatible firmware that can't be changed. The communication can be a little finicky, but when you type in a URL and press enter, you should see the Tx/Rx light blink as well as the status light.

Address book function added.

EDIT^^^ your email is actually: [email protected] I would have loved to get ti99.com, but had to settle for myti99.com

For anyone interested in Stuart's Browser Project and web-apps, I have created a web-based email system that you can use to send and receive email right from your TI console. I am still working on getting some issues sorted out with being able to send mail reliably to some external mail providers. Most companies have serious anti-spam measures in place, and I think in addition to a reverse-DNS entry, I might need to learn more about DKIM and other fun topics. For the time being, emailing locally on the system between myTI99 accounts works perfectly. If you sign up on myti99.com, then your email address is [email protected] and with the browser, you can compose and read email. If you create a new account, please note that it takes up to a minute to have your account completely provisioned (a background process that does this is kicked off via CRON every minute) Please send me any feedback/bug reports/issues and I'll sort them out. My TI email is: [email protected] if anyone wants to drop me a note. Thanks, Corey.

I'll be bringing a stock TI-99 4/A, PEB, Smallish TV screen, and a Lantronix ethernet bridge on my own cellmodem for Internet access. Anyone can use this for their demos if they want to, that way not everyone has to lug a system along with them. I'll also bring along my projector in case there's a suitable place to use it. I look forward to seeing everyone's demos!

I think I might hook up my sig gen in to where the xtal goes and see jet how fast the TI can go!

Looking forward to trying it out! I have plans to refactor some of my chess code after being blown away by the <1k tiny chess games that I've learned about thanks to this forum. Such a fun project.

Also: *its. on its way.

Greg, Apparently I have the F18A version of the nano, according to the start screen. What does this mean exactly? I have the F18 mod kit and it involves replacing the TMS9918A on the motherboard. What does the F18 nano accomplish exactly?

I've been working on getting better at TI assembly, and I've successfully been writing code on my MacBook and compiling it locally with the xdt99 tools which are easy to install. I then create a binary image and just uploaded it to js99er.net and run it. It works amazingly well. Prior to xdt99, I had been running Win994A on Ubuntu via Wine. Works perfectly and allows me to lug around my MacBook and hack ASM during lunch at work. -Corey

We could host a TI chat on the myti99.com website, with people participating on their consoles, those with the necessary stuff to run Stuart's web browser. His multi-line version should be out by then.

I agree, and it seems a little slower now with the large text area where you can navigate the cursor around. I wonder if it can be sped up, but I'm not nearly as skilled as people like Stuart with TI Assembly.

I wasn't holding the camera upside down, but I think the orientation data gets fouled up sometimes due to accelerometer readings being off. I guess I've seen this before with portrait vs landscape with videos taken on my phone, but the strange thing here is that it's ok everywhere - my computer's image previewer, the browser, etc, and it's only AtariAge that is misinterpreting the data when it is creating thumbnails.

I don't use Windows but did the same thing on my Mac. I rotated and saved to a new file which AtariAge also showed upside down. If you right-click on my image and view in another window or tab, it's fine but for some strange reason AtariAge is rotating the original.

Stuart has added multi-line text input for his browser (!) It's still being debugged and I'm helping QA it now, but wow is it cool. I will be creating an email client for myti99.com so all registrants will automatically get: <screenname>@myti99.com. I have already modified the chat program to support more lines of input - one line of 42 characters just wasn't cutting it for a proper chat. Is it April 1st yet? Why is it that when I attach a screen shot image, AtariAge seems to rotate it 180 degrees? I manually rotated the image and re-attached it to compensate, and it still comes out rotated. The image is here: http://myti99.com/multilinetest.jpg but AtariAge rotates it for some reason.

For the DeviceInstaller on Windows XP, you maybe have to deactivate the firewall for the moment I tried TFTP from the command line on Linux (TFTP is very basic) and also from XP, both failed with the "invalid password" error. As for DeviceInstaller, I read that the "firewall" must be disabled to run it, but didn't think it would prevent it from installing. I don't think I'll bother since it looks like these UDS-10s seem to have been flashed with a custom MODBUS firmware that doesn't support re-flashing. The MODBUS manual shows menu options that I don't even have. It might be possible to hack the firmware into place, but this would be non-trivial. Oh well.

There's nothing besides a "Set to Factory Default" option in the menus, but this doesn't reset whatever's locked down. The reset button doesn't do anything either. I'll have to explore the RS232 pin-shorting method. I think it might be a custom firmware that someone put together for a particular application that can't be changed, in which case it's a paperweight.

Ok I did a little more research. These UDS-10s are somehow flashed with custom firmware that is locked down and apparently immutable. I read the MODBUS manual and I don't have access to some of the menus shown, only 1-4 show up at all. There are Advanced and Security menus that are in the manual, but don't appear when you log into the device. Bummer. I even tried to TFTP the ROM to it and it comes back with: ERROR ON SERVER: WRONG PASSWORD. TFTP doesn't even support usernames or passwords, so there's some seriously funky stuff going on here.

Ok I tried tonight, but I couldn't get these UDS-10s to accept a new image. I tried using the serial port and was able to get into the Monitor mode and typed DL to start the process. The manual doesn't say which protocol to use (XMODEM, ASCII, etc) so I tried each one. They either fail to transfer or a message appears that states that "this firmware is not compatible" right away, before the file is even done transferring. I was using Minicom on a Linux machine. I also tried with Windows XP and HyperTerminal and couldn't get it to start transferring at all, trying all of the xfer protocols. I know the serial port is good in both cases because I can press xx2 at the right time and get a prompt from the UDS-10. I'd sure like to know how on earth to do this via the serial port since the software from the Lantronix won't even install on either of my two XP machines. I have some questions for people who have successfully flashed their UDS-10 ROMs: 1) If you've successfully installed the DeviceInstaller software from Lantronix, what OS do you have? I've tried XP with SP3 and it just barfs trying to install and never completes. I'm curious if Windows 7 works. I could take them to my work and do it there if so. 2) Has anyone done this via the serial port? If so, what xfer protocol did you use? (Xmodem, etc) Thanks.

I thought the .hex route would be harder, since this DeviceInstaller was available for download. This installer is from 2002 or so - any idea why it won't work in XP anymore? I'll try to figure out how to do it throughout the serial console, now that I figured out your FTP link Hopefully this modbus firmware supports it.

Well I downloaded the DeviceInstaller from Lantronix's web site, but the PoS doesn't work. I'm trying to run it on XP (The only non-VM version of windows I have) on an ThinkPad and the damn thing just runs for a while and stops with this message "The installer was interrupted before deviceinstaller could be installed. You need to restart the installer to try again." HUH? I guess it interrupted itself. or something. I did try restarting and of course it just does the same thing over and over, even after reboots. Has anyone successfully run this program and flashed a UDS-10 with the ROM: ltx5805.rom using this program and Windows XP? I don't have anything else at home and won't be buying/upgrading windows just for some feeble program that *might* work. ARG.

Do you know how to do a 'factory reset'? There is a way to restore factory settings from within the login, but I can't find anything about a full-on factory reset. The little recessed button might do it, but it doesn't explicitly say so in the manual (I don't think). Either way, these need a brain transplant.

Speaking of UDS-10 devices - I received the two that Vorticon sent me. I figured out how to telnet into them (They're on a 192.168.1.n network) and NOT using DHCP, and they appear to have a different firmware on them - something for ModBus. Hopefully I can flash them with the same firmware as my others so they can work with the BBSes and Stuart's Browser. We can give them away as raffle prizes