Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!

Just refused to open a directory window at all, looking at the Pi from the RiscPC. But I’ll try again & report. If it doesn’t work, I’ll take more careful note of the details! Probably won’t look at this for a day or two – bringing !Fontician up-to-date at the moment, to help with polishing up & updating some fonts, but also to release into the wild if anyone wants it.

A year or so ago, I found that the switch that I was using to connect my RPi to my Risc PCs was stopping Access/FS_Share from working. I don’t remember the exact details now though (although I think it was an 8-port 100/10 switch?). Suffice to say that switching the switch cured the problem.

Ralph

Ah. Interesting. I’ll try that – I do have another switch I could try. It wasn’t stopping the RiscPCs talking to each other though…

Thanks Rick for the heads up.
I acquired a second hand RiscPC a couple of years ago on Ebay (to keep the GF occupied playing SimCity2000) and it had signs of battery leakage. It was sold with a new battery to replace the one on the board that wasn’t holding CMOS stuff. When I got it home, I found the blue/green fluffy sh!t happening. I was able to repair the damaged tracks at the time and get it working.
Folowing the video, I have since gone back to check and the new battery was also starting to go fluffy! Cute under the right circumstances, but not these! I’ve spent this weekend removing it and all the affected components, cleaning them and re-fitting. I’ve replaced the original battery with a couple of Duracell on a twin holder with a PP3 connector into the original point via a diode that sits just behind the Acorn badge bit. I’ve also brought to the front of the case, a test button,a red LED via 100ohm resistor and an extention in parallel to the original reset switch at the back into the space under the floppy drive. My thinking is, the forward voltage of a red LED is just under two volts, so if and when I test it, if it fails to light, I ought to replace the batteries, (or I’m too late!)
My first RiscPC from Jan95 currently appears unaffected, but I will apply the battery mod to that soon. The reset switch was an important addition many years ago when lot of stuff appeared to fail before the likes of !Game On and !StrongGuard came about.

A year or so ago, I found that the switch that I was using to connect my RPi to my Risc PCs was stopping Access/FS_Share from working.

I’ve used a hacked-about version of Freeway for a long time that supports remote networks (there is partial support built in to many versions but it’s always been incomplete). That allowed a RiscPC on one network to talk to an emulator running on a PC on another network, for example.

Was it Freeway that the switch interfered with or Access? ie were your remote drives greyed out (Freeway failure) or green but unreachable (Access)?

I’ve never tried an iPad, but I was surprised a few months back to see that an iPhone behaves like a standard MTP device, and was fully readable by my MTP app.

Only just gotten around to trying your MTP app with my MTP devices (got bored of writing code to parse data out of HTML).

Results:

In terms of usability, it is odd having the file type where the filename should be. If possible, could you consider implementing a “basic” mode that looks more like the filer? [name, size, date]
Would it be possible to trap Adjust-clicking on the close icon and make it open the parent instead of just closing the window?
Would it be possible to drag-save directly from the files list? I tried a number of times before I double-clicked the file and saw all the information. It is nice that you make this information available, however for grabbing a few pictures from a phone, it is more complicated than it needs to be.

• Creative Zen – failed. But, then, I think this is a proprietary “looks and feels like MTP but isn’t quite” protocol. The information available in USBInfo was missing… quite a lot. Way to go, Creative.

• Sony Xperia U – takes a while to connect (but I think a lot of that is the phone twiddling its thumbs). A number of additional properties are supported (battery level is 48%, date and time says it is 2005 (!), sync partner, device friendly name “XPERIA U”, and unknown “D120”.
  Choosing the device icon property apologises for not having code to handle that, which is then followed by a crash. MTP fails afterwards, until the device unplugged and plugged back in again.
  In use, it reads the contents, copying is reasonably quick. Apart from a few quirks, getting information off of my phone is fairly effortless. Copying a photo to the phone was also surprisingly quick.

• Apple iPad Mini. Quick warning – if you just plug in the iPad, !MTP will never work. You need to turn on the iPad and tell it that, yes, you trust this computer.
  Once you have done that, it works as effortlessly as the phone; with the minor exception that the photos are grouped into line-noise-named directories. You don’t see that on a PC so I wonder how behaviour differs? Still, it isn’t a big issue. The Apple offers only one property, that MTP doesn’t understand.

Neither device supports taking pictures. Both provide serial numbers and such.

I’m quite pleased. I had taken a photo on the iPad that mom wants printed. I want to do it in a photobooth in the supermarket as my printer’s (clone) inks don’t like photo paper. Now, there are very very few photo booths in the world that talk Apple. Furthermore, Apple’s idea of Bluetooth does not include pushing files around. So I need to transfer the file to my phone (and then just bluetooth it to the booth).
How to do this?
Well, the simple method is to just email the photo to myself. I can’t believe it is two thousand and beeping fourteen and tech with these sorts of price tags is reduced to “email myself a file”. Jeez.
The harder method is to power up the Windows box and connect the devices and transfer from iPad to harddisc and harddisc to phone. Transferring to the phone is a doddle. Transferring from the iPad is harder, as about half the time Explorer tells me the files are all zero bytes or that there are no files. Marvellous.

Or… there’s a third option. iPad to storage, storage to phone. In the middle? RISC OS. I’ve plugged and unplugged and started !MTP a dozen times and (unlike Windows) it just works so the PC can stay in standby tonight. The photo is on my phone, I can get it printed tomorrow. I am, I guess, “dead chuffed”.

(^_^)

Would it be possible to drag-save directly from the files list?

It already does, if you drag the filetype icon.

I never got around to dealing with multiple files, so you’ll have to drag them one at a time.

Someone sent me modified code that dealt with multiple selections – sorry, whoever you are, I can’t remember your name and I’m at work so I can’t look the information up – but I didn’t get around to trying it and putting it up on my site as I was busy doing other things.