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TIPI Usage and Support


jedimatt42

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Looking at this thing, uses either SSD1306 or SSD1305, although it clearly doesn't use the full resolution of either chip since those are 128x64 or 132x64 respectively, I'm not 100% sure which offhand. I guess they behave rather similarly, but if you're using a 1306, I should make sure it also uses a 1306 unless your library supports both without modification.

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It is SSD1305, and apparently the init code for the 1305 is completely different from the 1306. Might just be a different blob you need to send, but the setup's totally different and Adafruit's Python module at least doesn't support both.

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I haven't removed the feature. I have removed MY display.

 

I feel it is extremely important that this is never anything more than eye candy, so that people who do not want to spend the money on glitz are not penalized.

 

It is open source.. fork it and do what you like.

 

-M@

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I thought it might be useful to be able to send things to the display from inside games and the like, as well as the potential to indicate statuses like new chatti messages and the like when not actively displaying stuff for the game or whatever you're running right now.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Using the tipi we can send commands to the pi, but can we go the other way and have the pi take control of the ti? Something like an ide on the pi that can save a basic program as a tifile and then use the tipi to force the ti to load and run it?

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I thought it might be useful to be able to send things to the display from i... ...as well as the potential to indicate statuses like new chatti messages...

 

I also would like the ability to know if there has been any Chatti activity. Not everyone 'approves' of the Pi doing this sort of thing, but that's the nice thing about a diverse community, we can use what we like, and pass on the rest.

 

Have you started coding anything yet?

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Using the tipi we can send commands to the pi, but can we go the other way and have the pi take control of the ti? Something like an ide on the pi that can save a basic program as a tifile and then use the tipi to force the ti to load and run it?

 

I'm personallly not interested in using the PI as a desktop or promoting activity that has you SSH'ing into it.

 

There is a file share on the PI you can access from your regular PC/Mac/Linux desktops... If you save a file in that share with the suffix: .BAS, .XB, .bas, or .xb, then that text file can be loaded as a PROGRAM image file directly in TI BASIC or TI XB... ( RXB, GAZOOXB, GKB, whatever... ) In a program listing it will show as a DIS/VAR file, but if you attempt to use the LOAD feature of the TI filesystem, it will run it through Ralph's xbas99 text to BASIC tool, and load that.

 

So you can IDE all you want on your real desktop.

 

Also, from the web-ui of the PI, you can edit these .BAS, .XB, ... or real PROGRAM image files that we detect as basic.. save them, and then just load them on the TI.

 

Using the TIPI to force the TI to do stuff, well, there isn't much support for that in the hardware of the 4A... an external device cannot set the program counter, or read/write the scratch pad ram... You could write a load-interrupt routine and then with the press of a button cause your TI to go do something... I suppose you could wire your PI up to act as that button. That isn't accessible on the TI expansion bus to my knowledge. So you'd have to modify your consoles.

 

I've heard ElectricLab has gcc for the 9900 installed on his PI... and just nano's or vim's his way around and compiles directly to the tipi_disk folder. I personally find my laptop a lot faster, and just add to my compile scripts an scp command to push the ea5 artifact out to the PI..

 

-------------

 

If you wanted to get crazy, and fork TIPI to do something that causes the TI to take instruction from the PI, I would write a vdp interrupt service routine that every so many cycles, polls the PI for some machine code to load. You could use the RawExtensions mechanisms to keep the polling as cheap as possible... this has proven fine for my mouse activity. Then, if you really want your TI to act like that, you can alter the TIPI powerup routine in the DSR rom, and have it install this on powerup.. then, you also externalize the reset line on the 9900, and hook it up properly to a GPIO pin on the PI. ( It's 5v on your 9900, so wiring that direct to the PI will break the PI ) Then, now the PI can reset the TI whenever it wants, the powerup routine will run, and start polling for machine code to load, and the PI can make that available. BAM... PI-Borg hive has locutus'ed your 4A...

 

Ok, that was a fun thought experiment, and no longer interesting.

 

I think Speccery's setup with a 99105 attached to an FPGA and PC becomes a better setup for that sort of thing. The internals of the 'console' are in the FPGA and the connection to the PC is on the 'inside' instead of stuck on the outside where Texas Instruments protected itself from crazy ideas like this.

 

------

 

Just dig in and study the TI architecture. Then study the TIPI design files... and you can do whatever you want.

 

-M@

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I'm inclined to also feel like the display is a red herring. I'm using this Pi in headless mode. It never has had a USB keyboard nor display hooked up to it. I also have not SSH'd into it. I'm using it for it's designed purpose and that only; an extensible network interface and storage solution, which it excels at.

 

There might be a day where I have to hook something up, but Matthew has made it easy to fix: burn a new DSR rom and image a new micro SD. No muss, no fuss, easiest recovery ever.

 

The only thing that I have remotely even wanted to look into getting into the unit for is scp'ing the directory structure of my files over to a Mac for backup.

 

 

Sent from my moto g(6) using Tapatalk

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I understand where both of you are coming from, and that's cool. I personally find the display kind of neat when I'm on the BBS and I've grown attached to the LED on the TIPI, in that I've found you don't want to quit the Telnet program when the light it on! ;)

 

Yes, I agree the TIPI is a FANTASTIC network interface and storage solution... and now it's even a mouse interface... what's next?

 

I found one comment interesting, especially with the company of software and hardware hackers that hang out around here... WHEN do we "box ourselves in" and only use something for "it's designed purpose'"? :lol: If we only used the hardware Texas Instruments designed for us, and in the manner they prescribed, we would never have had so many cool hardware gadgets, like the TIPI created for it.

 

What might be a shiny or distracting little Pi trinket today, could become quite useful tomorrow if given the chance. Part of the fun, for me, is to ponder... "where is this going"? I like to explore the possibilities of "what could be" or "might be", so some day I can say "positively". It's the same kind of thinking that took us into space... and the same thinking that created the TIPI.

 

I'm undecided on how I'll run the P-Box version of the TIPI when I buy one. Will I use the same Rpi, or will I buy another one and mount it internally? Will I run light pipes from the RPi to one of the P-Box's indicator slits? I Dunno, but half the fun is thinking about it.

 

Whatever we do, it's all good, as long as it keeps our interest in the hobby going.

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Ohm - you're very enthusiastic and always testing the limits. I appreciate that.

 

However, this unit is coming out with a specific feature set with an intended purpose. We could keep doing feature creep forever with this because the hardware is so open. Let's get it out of the gate first. Let's let Matthew recoup his investment. After that, it's wide open for people to fork, make and sell modifications to, etc.

 

Matthew will always support a known baseline for the hardware and software. Additions or changes will be the responsibility of whomever is introducing those to the community. If adds ons or changes break the TIPI, IMHO it's the fork's responsibility to fix, unless it's a defect in the original source tree.

 

The issue here is the possibility for expansion are endless. Linux offers amazing expandability. The PI has USB ports and additional GPIO. Matthew just can't support every possibility going out the door. He has to be able to support the thing.

 

The display was something he used for troubleshooting, and wasn't intended to be added or supported. Can you add one after the fact? Sure, but someone will have to support the thing and keep up with any PI OS and Matthews DSR and software updates.

 

Just understand that I don't think we are trying to quell the possibilities here. We just need to keep a known state config that can be supported first, then people can knock their socks off after.

 

 

Sent from my moto x4 using Tapatalk

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You should be free to hard reset or soft reset the 4A even when the TIPI red light is active.

 

The TIPI service should get killed nearly immediately, and subsequently restarted by the OS.

 

If you are still having issues with that after the latest (....19) update, please let me know.

 

-M@

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I also would like the ability to know if there has been any Chatti activity. Not everyone 'approves' of the Pi doing this sort of thing, but that's the nice thing about a diverse community, we can use what we like, and pass on the rest.

 

Have you started coding anything yet?

 

 

I don't have one of those little I2C screens so I won't be working on this. If someone wants to, as M@ says, go for it! It would involve writing some code to run on the pi that would use the CHATTI API. I could lend a hand understanding the as-of-yet-undocumented API.

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I don't have one of those little I2C screens so I won't be working on this. If someone wants to, as M@ says, go for it! It would involve writing some code to run on the pi that would use the CHATTI API. I could lend a hand understanding the as-of-yet-undocumented API.

 

Actually my reply about coding was to iKarith, but if not having one of those little screens is all that's holding you back, please PM me with your address and I'll order one and have it sent directly to you! icon_biggrinwink.gif

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I released an update 1.0betav0020 last night.

If you upload a .DSK or .dsk file to the PI, either through the web-ui or 'tipi' windows file share, then tipimon.service will automatically replace that file with an extracted directory. It will not look at files named .tidisk, rename them before you upload.

If a disk image has the same volume name as a sibling directory, then the new extracted directory will add _1, or _2, etc as necessary.

This supports track and sector dump files. The file extraction is thanks to Ralph's xdm99. I wrote a little code to detect and transform track dumps to sector dumps.

 

Note: The TIPI DSK1-3 mapping services report the volume name of the drive as the directory name it is mapped to. So if your software requires a specific volume name to function, the _1 directories won't work. You will need to move/rename things around. I added the suffix for the use case where someone named all their disks 'BLANK'.

---

Also in this update is very small change to my library for communicating between TIPI and your PI. This improves signal reliability.

 

---

 

This makes my life easier, as I strive to be independent from disk images.

 

-M@

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...

The only thing that I have remotely even wanted to look into getting into the unit for is scp'ing the directory structure of my files over to a Mac for backup.

...

 

If it helps, here is how I have backup for my tipi TI files automated. It runs once a day when I'm not likely to be awake, (except 5am might be utc, in which case I'm probably still up...) and copies any changes to the files the 4A can see.

 

As the 'tipi' user on the PI, in my crontab, via command crontab -e:

 

0 5 * * * /home/tipi/tipi-backup.sh >/dev/null

And /home/tipi/tipi-backup.sh looks like:

#!/bin/bash

DEST=/mnt/raid/Shared/Matthew/TI994a/tipi-backup/
SRC=/home/tipi/tipi_disk/

rsync -avzhe ssh --delete $SRC matthew@kuat:$DEST | tee /var/log/tipi/backup.log

'kuat' is a linux file server that has opensshd and rsync installed. Should work against a MAC with 'remote login' enabled (SSH) and an rsync installed via brew or some other mechanism ( I don't recall if rsync is there for free on OS X )

 

I have 'tipi' user on the PI setup with keys in .ssh, and on the remote host, kuat, the public key is in user 'matthew' .ssh/authorized_keys file.

 

Anyway, just an example of how I have my tipi data backed up. None of this is raspberry PI or TIPI specific, so 'google' will be a better source of information than myself, or Atariage.

 

 

-M@

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Oh, one more note about the DSK image transformation... this happens in the background by tipimon.service so it is in effect when uploading to the windows file share or through the web-ui. Consequently, in the web-ui ( or your network file browser ) you may have to 'refresh' to see the result... I'll experiment with improving that in the web-ui for a future release..

 

-M@

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  • 3 weeks later...

Quick question - I'm on the DSR just before this one:

  • tipi-dsr.zip - TIPI DSR ROM - 32k binary EPROM image (2018-06-23). Fix compatibility with Geneve in ROMPAGE mode. Removes 4A boot chime.

I don't have a Geneve so not imperative to update correct? Just looking to save myself some work.

Things are coming together for me so i am going to be easing back in slowly. Have a lot of catching up to do. I see so many changes to TiPi uses (new games and Chatti stuff and whatnot) that I feel lost at the moment.

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