Linux Fu: Eavesdropping on Serial
In the old days, if you wanted to snoop on a piece of serial gear, you probably had a serial monitor or, perhaps, an attachment for your scope or logic …read more Continue reading Linux Fu: Eavesdropping on Serial
Category Archives: rs232
Tio is a Serial Terminal For Us
With Linux and the serial port there is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that Linux has great support for serial hardware of all sorts …read more Continue reading Tio is a Serial Terminal For Us
DIY Wireless Serial Adapter Speaks (True) RS-232
There is a gotcha lurking in wait for hackers who look at a piece of equipment, see a port labeled “Serial / RS-232”, and start to get ideas. The issue …read more Continue reading DIY Wireless Serial Adapter Speaks (True) RS-232
Linux Fu: Serial Untethered
Serial ports used to be everywhere. In a way, they still are since many things that appear to plug in as a USB device actually look like a serial port. The problem is that today, the world runs on the …read more
No More Floppy Drives for this Agilent Scope
When [kiwih] picked up an Agilent 54621A scope, he was amused that it had a floppy disk. At one time, it was high-tech to use a disk to transfer scope data to your computer. Today, not so much. However, on the back was a serial port. Surely it was possible …read more
Continue reading No More Floppy Drives for this Agilent Scope
Raspberry Pi Helps Vintage Psion Find its Voice
Ask a hacker to imagine computing in the 1980s, and they might think of the classic 8-bit all-in-one machines from the likes of Commodore and Atari, or perhaps the early PCs and Macs. No matter the flavor, they’ll likely have one thing in common: a lack of mobility thanks to …read more
Continue reading Raspberry Pi Helps Vintage Psion Find its Voice
A Full-Stack Web Browser
Interviewing to be a full-stack engineer is hard. It’s a lot harder than applying for a junior dev job where you’re asked to traverse a red-black tree on a whiteboard. For the full-stack job, they just give you a pile of 2N2222 transistors. (The first company wasn’t a great fit, …read more
Behold The WT-220: A ‘Clever’ VT-220 Terminal
[John Whittington] failed to win a bid for an old VT-220 serial terminal on eBay, so he decided to make his own version and improve it along the way. The result is the Whitterm-220 (or WT-220) which has at its core a Raspberry Pi and is therefore capable of more than just acting as a ‘dumb’ serial terminal.
The enclosure is made from stacked panels of laser-cut plywood with an acrylic plate on the back for labels and connectors, where [John] worked paint into the label engravings before peeling off the acrylic’s protective film. By applying paint after laser-engraving but …read more
Continue reading Behold The WT-220: A ‘Clever’ VT-220 Terminal
Behold The WT-220: A ‘Clever’ VT-220 Terminal
[John Whittington] failed to win a bid for an old VT-220 serial terminal on eBay, so he decided to make his own version and improve it along the way. The result is the Whitterm-220 (or WT-220) which has at its core a Raspberry Pi and is therefore capable of more than just acting as a ‘dumb’ serial terminal.
The enclosure is made from stacked panels of laser-cut plywood with an acrylic plate on the back for labels and connectors, where [John] worked paint into the label engravings before peeling off the acrylic’s protective film. By applying paint after laser-engraving but …read more
Continue reading Behold The WT-220: A ‘Clever’ VT-220 Terminal
Easy Portable Serial Ports
Modern operating systems insulate us — as programmers, especially — from so much work. Depending on how far back you go, programmers had to manage their own fonts, their own allocation space on mass storage, or even their own memory allotments. Every year, though, it seems like things get easier and easier. So why is it so annoying to open a simple serial port? It isn’t hard, of course, but on every operating system it seems to be painful — probably in an attempt to be flexible. And it is even worse if you want portability. I needed to write …read more