Question for P-Box TIPI owners - (REMOVAL of the FDC)

[+--- Ω ---]

I know there are one or two legacy programs out there that actually require a physical DSK1 to run, but after having your TIPI installed in your P-Box, have you ever considered REMOVING the floppy drive controller all together?   In my case I've not really used a physical disk drive or my Lotharek HxC in some time. 

 

My thoughts were removing the floppy controller and the HxC and installing a faceplate that houses an SD card extension for the TIPI's Rpi and maybe an I2C display.  By removing the floppy controller I should also gain extra memory for Extended BASIC.  Many people run sidecar TIPI's and Nano's without the need for real floppy drives, so why should P-Box owners?

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 4 by --- Ω ---
Error in assumption on memory size

[+arcadeshopper]

It should be fine. It was designed to do just that

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[+--- Ω ---]

14 minutes ago, arcadeshopper said:

It should be fine. It was designed to do just that

Man, if you could come up with an "Arcadeshopper Kit" that has a 3D printed faceplate with openings for an SD card and an I2C display, with all hardware and hookup cables included, I'd be an instant +1.

[+arcadeshopper]

Man, if you could come up with an "Arcadeshopper Kit" that has a 3D printed faceplate with openings for an SD card and an I2C display, with all hardware and hookup cables included, I'd be an instant +1.

A full height one? I can print a cover but it takes a ton of time/filiment



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[+--- Ω ---]

1 minute ago, arcadeshopper said:

A full height one? I can print a cover but it takes a ton of time/filiment



Sent from my LM-G820 using Tapatalk
 

No, just a half height, I already have some switches and a temperature gauge in the first half-height space.

[wierd_w]

Out of curiosity, what printer do you use ArcadeShopper?

 

I have a chinese clone of a Prusa i3 (A JGAurora A3)

[+--- Ω ---]

I'm thinking it would be kind of neat to have an SD card slot on the front of the P-Box.  This way I could easily swap different 'personalities' for my TIPI, or even use the RPi for something entirely non-TI related with a quick swap of an SD card.

[wierd_w]

Better to just use some fancy shell scripts Omega.  TIPI is linux underneath, and that means fancy mountpoints are doable.  Especially if you have a NAS on your network.

A quick blast of rsh over the telnet connection, and bob's your uncle. You can have entire volumes inside files, sitting on the NAS waiting to be mounted, for instance.

 

EG, create a 2gb volume file like this--

 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/samba/2gbvol.img BS=1M count=2048

 

then put an ext4 file system on it with

 

mkfs.ext4 /mnt/samba/2gbvol.img

 

then you just mount it on top of your SD card as you need it.

EG--

 

mount -t ext4 /mnt/samba/2gbvol.img /mnt/sdcard/dsk1

 

make sure the dsk1 folder is empty though!

You can unmount it with

 

sync && umount /mnt/sdcard/dsk1

 

(just make sure nothing is using files on it though, otherwise it will error that the volume is in use, and cannot be unmounted.)

 

rsh stands for "remote shell", and lets you send a one-liner over the telnet or ssh connection. On the pi side, just have some utility scripts set up that have these things inside. That way instead of '2gbvol.img' you could have 'DiskManagement', and your rsh could be something like

 

rsh /home/tipi/MountDiskManagement.sh

 

that would tell the pi to run that script. The script then executes and does any initial sync & unmount, followed by mounting your desired set there.

There really shouldn't be a reason to remove the sdcard from the Pi... basically ever... if you set it up right.

 

 

[+--- Ω ---]

Over my head, above my pay grade, confusing for this old fart and apparently time consuming.  I guess for programming types this would work, but for me, swapping an SD card is probably easier.  Old dog, new tricks, failing memory.  Thanks though.

[wierd_w]

With the right scripts in place its the same difficulty level if the nanopeb. *shrug*