Econet on a Pinebook Pro?

Hello,

I’ve got a Pinebook Pro running RISC OS 5 and was wondering if anyone knew of a way to physically connect it to Econet. I’d assume some kind of adapter, but no idea if such a thing exists!

Many thanks,
Colin

I don’t know of any Econet adapters that could interface directly with a Pinebook Pro.

However, if you’ve got a spare Raspberry Pi, that can be used as the basis of an Econet to AUN bridge – the PBPro uses an Ethernet connection to the bridge, and the bridge has a “proper” Econet interface.

Thank you, Stuart, that’s very helpful! I’d heard about the Econet AUN bridge but wasn’t clear on exactly how to use it – so your post has helped clarify that for me.

I’m not familiar with the Pinebook Pro, but it’s worth mentioning that the original Pinebook version of RISC OS was missing a few Econet-related modules from ROM (namely NetFS, NetFiler, NetPrint and NetStatus) when it was first open sourced. As such, you might want to check the output of *ROMModules just to make sure it’s got everything you need.

My Pinebook pro has 5.29 and I can confirm the Econet modules are missing. Thank you for pointing that out as I had not actually noticed this before. I have a PCB on my bench that aims to be Econet for the PBP but I need to get the Pi hat version fully working first. It should be possible to build those modules outside the ROM build and load them on demand.

Thank you, Cameron, that’s really helpful! I’ll check later, but suspect I’ll be in the same boat as Alan.

Alan, if you do get around to finishing that Econet for PBP board, please let me know – especially if it’s something you’d consider making for sale!

I need to get the Pi hat version fully working first.

I’d be interested in the Pi hat.

missing a few Econet-related modules from ROM (namely NetFS, NetFiler, NetPrint and NetStatus)

Are you sure they are missing and not simply dormant? They put themselves to sleep in the absence of suitable hardware.

and load them on demand.

That’s what the NetI module does, to punt Econet packets over TCP/IP, loaded at startup if AUN is enabled.
[but, for some reason, currently incompatible with the ROD stack – I’ve let Andrew know but I wouldn’t imagine Econet is even remotely close to being a priority ;) ]

Econet on TCP/IP: https://gitlab.riscosopen.org/RiscOS/Sources/Networking/AUN/Net

Are you sure they are missing and not simply dormant? They put themselves to sleep in the absence of suitable hardware.

They were commented out in the Components file, which means they was missing rather than dormant or unplugged. The commit linked below restored the components for the original Pinebook, however it seems reasonable to assume that these changes may be needed for the Pinebook Pro as well.

https://gitlab.riscosopen.org/RiscOS/BuildSys/-/commit/a97bf83a8d59d026b49fb27ec33299cb7c99e366

I’d be interested in the Pi hat.

I will be more than happy to send you one when its reasonably close to fully implimented.

Its going quite well, its using a PICO with code code written by Andrew Gordon over on stardot. All of the hard work is getting done in the pico, this means that there are no background transfers in RISC OS, anything that happens in your buffers happens in the thread you call the econet swi on.

This also means there are no interrupts and therefore nowhere to generate events. I thought at the time that was ok I had never seen a use case for Econet events but then on my RiscPC I wrote a new version of TCP/IP over Econet using the old DCI2/RISCiX encapsulation but for DCI4, and half that runs in an event handler.

I am watching the current gpio interrupts thread with interest but I think for my econet hat I will just poll it on the system 100hz. Dealing with more than 100 econet packets per second seems unlikely (please nobody point out that assumptions like that lead to all the best bugs).

The Pinebook adapter (its generically a USB Econet interfaces really) will need me to change the interface to the pico to usb serial & I have not really thought about that much yet.

I am not sure about this business of selling things its more like giving away the spares. You get 5 PCB from JLC you build a couple for your self and then there are three left to give away and that’s probably saturated the market.

I will be more than happy to send you one

💜

Dealing with more than 100 econet packets per second seems unlikely

How much is transferred at a time? I think the Archimedes machines can go quite fast.
Though I’d more be interested in digging out my old FileStore, which is Really Effing Slow!