I've compiled a new Class for Poseidon. It is serialft232r.class for the FTDI USB to UART (Serial) Chip on the DrawBridge Controller. It is supposed to use serial.device to setup a serial connection.

It's not showing up in Trident Prefs though. Maybe I have to add it manually.

The new Poseidon Class didn't work as expected. But there is hope still of being able to read/write Amiga 68k diskettes on AROS.

There is a new OS4 Software Project called Waffle Reader. Yes, strange name but interesting topic! 🤪

Of special interest to me is the ftdi.library that is used by the system to communicate with the ftdi chip.

Read more about it here:

https://github.co...fflereader

The Serial Disk Reader is a very ambitious project. I'd like to write a new Poseidon FT232R Class to use the FTDI chip and serial.device to talk to the Arduino controller on a Drawbridge equipped USB Floppy Drive. If successful this will allow reading & writing Amiga 68k disks.

At first this seems like a daunting task and it can quickly become overwhelming! So it can be broken down into smaller pieces. So far I used the PL2303 class as a basis. I changed the file naming to FT232R then compiled it but at it's core it's not yet compatible with FTDI chips.

I still need to input the vendor & product id's as well as the logic to communicate with the FTDI chip. My first goal is to establish a link with the chip to read back vendor & product id & product description.

At this point I still don't know if all this is possible. We'll see how it goes. ;-)

Recently I've had some success in using Copilot AI to write RLE functions for picture Datatypes.

With that in mind I decided to try a test to see how smart Copilot is. I asked how to write an AROS Poseidon class for a UART driver in c code. The response was interesting!

It provided a compilable UART driver.

I'm going to try to assemble a working UART driver for FTDI that will link to the chip in the Drawbridge equipped USB floppy drive. It should present a UART connection using serial.device to send/receive data.

On my own this would be a huge task but with assistance from Copilot AI I can take it one step at a time and in the process get a better understanding of what is needed.

So, if it's possible to write a UART driver that uses serial.device what can we do with it? We can write a Disk Reader/writer for Amiga Disks!

I imagine that DiskImage.device will be very useful as well. Since any adf that is produced by the DiskReader would need to be mounted to the desktop. It may be possible to call diskimage.device after reading the disk into an adf to mount the image automatically on the AROS desktop.

But that is very far off and unknown if it will work at all. ;-)

Over the next few days I will attempt to write a very basic FTDI class driver for Poseidon to communicate with the ftdi-arduino controller (aka drawbridge).

Once I have an FTDI class I can setup an ftdi_terminal program.

The ftdi_terminal is an interactive terminal program that works in the AROS shell to send & receive data. The textual data can also be sent to a log file for analysis (text file).

I have used a Terminal Program on Windows 10 Pro to communicate with drawbridge. So I know it works!

First signs of life for the FTDI-Arduino device (aka Drawbridge).

When compiling it I forgot to compile against the Poseidon Library at first & caused errors!

I know it isn't much but I used Poseidon Library API with psd commands to find the FTDI device using the Product ID &Vendor ID. Then I used the device to Get the Attributes for the Product Name.

In the screenshot you can see in the shell output the last line that starts with "product=" that's the device!!

This FTDI chip reader routine to return device information will be part of an FTDI Disk Reader Program.

For this project I have a good idea about how to move forward. The end goal is to be able to read/write Amiga disks using native AROS software along with DrawBridge. DrawBridge is the Amiga D.isk R.eader A.nd W.riter that acts like a Bridge using an Arduino controller.

Encouraged by the recent success in reading the Product Name using Poseidon Library I'd like to write a small interactive program to send and receive serial data using Poseidon Library API psd_ commands, mostly psdDoPipe.

The interactive shell program will allow me to send single byte commands to the Arduino to test some disk drive diagnostics. I have already done that on Windows 10 using TeraTerm with SerialIO.

These same psd commands are used in Poseidon Classes along with a Serial Bridge that translates SerialIO commands into psd commands. So that is one of my options. Write a Poseidon Class for FT232R to make the Drawbridge device into a serial device using standard AROS SerialIO commands. At the moment there's an error somewhere because it isn't binding.

Another key to the puzzle is to get the Drawbridge software to compile for AROS. Some parts may need to be modified to work correctly.

Lots of work to do!

The attached screenshot shows the Windows version of the command line program DrawBridge in action.

If you are interested here are some hardware photos of the DrawBridge Device (FTDI + Arduino).

This version of the PCB fits inside a common USB Floppy Disk Drive.

You purchase the DrawBridge & the USB Floppy Drive separately. Then you have to open the drive case & install the new PCB according to instructions on the device website.

I have a working DrawBridge equipped usb floppy drive if you would like the model number. Not all USB floppy drives will work though.

DrawBridge software can be compiled for Windows or Linux. Maybe in the near future AROS!

The DrawBridge equipped floppy drive can Read Amiga 68k disks to ADF. It can also Write ADF to disk.

AROS "native" in VirtualBox is very unstable. When I start the virtual machine after it being suspended I have to immediately restart or it will slow down to the point of being non usable! The mouse pointer gets very jerky and everything freezes till I can force a restart. After a fresh start I only have one chance to do testing. It's stable enough during a single session to get a little work done.

Because VirtualBox is so unstable I prefer to use AROS native x86 that I installed on one my mini PC's. It's very stable and it has no issues. But it has old system files and it won't run software compiled with the new Build System. So I will have to order some ssd's to install a newer AROS.

But I did learn something new. While trying to compile on my mini PC using GCC in the shell (my only option) there were many errors for the FTDI terminal program so I needed a way to send the output of the shell to a text file. Here's what I did...first type sh to convert to unix.

gcc ftdi_reader.c ftdi_reader -o >compile.log 2>&1

Usually, VMware is much better than VirtualBox: more solid e more supported.

I can confirm that I've never experienced any slowdowns with VMware, even though I use