Pcmcia Pico W Card(yyzkevin.com)
yyzkevin.com
Pcmcia Pico W Card
https://www.yyzkevin.com/pcmcia-pico-w-card/
45 comments
I always remember PCMCIA as "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms".
It's a bit of a shame that ExpressCard never got traction. I've had mixed success with USB Ethernet compared to the old PC-Card Ethernet.
It's a bit of a shame that ExpressCard never got traction. I've had mixed success with USB Ethernet compared to the old PC-Card Ethernet.
The fun days of using the ExpressCard slot to play AAA titles on a beat up Thinkpad or back when EVDO was the new hotness in mobile productivity..
>
I always remember PCMCIA as "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms".
To be fair they did change the name of the standard to PC Card - people just kept using the old name anyways.
To be fair they did change the name of the standard to PC Card - people just kept using the old name anyways.
PCMCIA was an ISA bus on a card. PC-Card was PCI on a card. Then came Express Card, and no prize for guessing what the bus used there was.
Express Card made the mistake of offering multiple form factors which made it harder for laptop manufacturers to support.
Express Card made the mistake of offering multiple form factors which made it harder for laptop manufacturers to support.
> I've had mixed success with USB Ethernet compared to the old PC-Card Ethernet.
This may change thanks to USB 4 (and Thunderbolt) being able to directly use PCIe lanes.
This may change thanks to USB 4 (and Thunderbolt) being able to directly use PCIe lanes.
holy goodness I have not even thought about PCMCIA for like ~30 years!!
Reading this is pretty funny to me because my first wireless router was a common one with a PCMCIA slot to connect a WiFi card :-)
MacBookPro G3 with PCMIA slot, an Orinoco Gold card, a Pringles can made into a Yagi style antenna, and a friend with a car for wardriving sessions. memory lane...
I was thinking what was the gold card and kept thinking of cryix cpu's, but it was Orinoco! Those were worth their weight in gold and hard to find compared to linksys pcmicia.
And then having to do some ndis wrapper fun with linksys or intel cards. Wow.
And even then, no packet injection!
And then having to do some ndis wrapper fun with linksys or intel cards. Wow.
And even then, no packet injection!
>I was thinking what was the gold card
Orinoco was one of those words that just stood out as it wasn't that common of a word in my daily vocabulary. Not needing to talk about rivers in South America, the only familiarity I had was from the Enya song. Everytime I'd insert the card into the slot, I'd sing "Sail away sail away" in my head.
Orinoco was one of those words that just stood out as it wasn't that common of a word in my daily vocabulary. Not needing to talk about rivers in South America, the only familiarity I had was from the Enya song. Everytime I'd insert the card into the slot, I'd sing "Sail away sail away" in my head.
we used to play around with them pre 802.11 as WaveLAN for under the radar point-to-point links back when the max 2Mbps was eye popping fast and eye popping expensive lol
this is the best sentence I have read on HN in a long time
I love the ridiculousness of this.
What's faster? The dual-core Cortex M0+ at 133MHz in his "wifi card"? Or the Intel 80486SX at 33MHz in his laptop?
What's faster? The dual-core Cortex M0+ at 133MHz in his "wifi card"? Or the Intel 80486SX at 33MHz in his laptop?
The C-M0 and by FAR. A 486 would be lucky to hit 0.4 instructions per cycle on a good day with much luck. C-M0 can maintain a IPC of 0.8 for most code (loads and stores are 2 cy, all alu stuffs are one).
486 ALU stuff is mostly 1 cycles as well (other than shifts, MUL and DIV, and all the weird stuff like AAD), as well as stores and loads. Taken conditional jumps are 3 cycles, non-taken 1 cycle, so loop unrolling helps a lot on 486.
You can approach 0.8 IPC on 486, assuming you know about AGI stalls and other quirks.
General 486-era C-compiler produced code, though, would be lucky to hit 0.4 IPC.
You can approach 0.8 IPC on 486, assuming you know about AGI stalls and other quirks.
General 486-era C-compiler produced code, though, would be lucky to hit 0.4 IPC.
I was taking intel's 80486 promo materials at face value. Plus 486 ALU may be 1-cycle but loads and stores are not 2-cycle like they are for C-M0 so it'll still lose :)
At least this page says 486 stores and loads are 1 cycle: https://zsmith.co/intel_m.php#mov
But it's been over 25 years since I last wrote asm for a 486 CPU.
But it's been over 25 years since I last wrote asm for a 486 CPU.
Most of these small ARM micros are an external memory interface and a good OS away from being a mid-90's workstation. The larger ones (high-end Cortex-Ms) are probably comparable to Powermacs of the early 2000's.
Heh, it reminds me of this gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0 which does something similar... using a modern device to give old devices essentially capabilities beyond what they should be able to do.
Similar for:
the 1541 disk drive that you would pair with a Commodore 64. It had a 6502 CPU in it, and was clocked a little faster than the 6510 CPU in the C64 itself.
The Apple LaserWriter'ss 68k cpu was clocked at 12Mhz, intended to be used with Macs having a 68k CPU clocked around 7.8Mhz.
the 1541 disk drive that you would pair with a Commodore 64. It had a 6502 CPU in it, and was clocked a little faster than the 6510 CPU in the C64 itself.
The Apple LaserWriter'ss 68k cpu was clocked at 12Mhz, intended to be used with Macs having a 68k CPU clocked around 7.8Mhz.
It bums me out that computers, generally, are becoming more obfuscated and locked down by default, but I begrudgingly admit that there are non-trivial benefits for many users, such as security and interface consistency. These cheap, hackable-by-design little machines gaining momentum as counterpoint really warms my heart.
5-10 years ago I was worried about a cliff for 80's car chips. Turns out, we can buy cheap programmable boards and write our own "native" solutions.
My current project is mapping out 80's HELLA cruise control units. They have just a few inputs and variables. Speed, brake signal, pump, clutch signal, and on mine, an additional signal to the APC to show it is engaged (to limit boost). Really, I think I'll be able to make this work - hopefully smoothly!
EDIT: these were in Saabs, but also other manufacturers like Land Cruiser and I think BMW as well. HELLA sold these as OES for these vehicles.
My current project is mapping out 80's HELLA cruise control units. They have just a few inputs and variables. Speed, brake signal, pump, clutch signal, and on mine, an additional signal to the APC to show it is engaged (to limit boost). Really, I think I'll be able to make this work - hopefully smoothly!
EDIT: these were in Saabs, but also other manufacturers like Land Cruiser and I think BMW as well. HELLA sold these as OES for these vehicles.
ha same! but for game cartridges. I was worried that dumpers would be impossible to find, nowadays I could just build one if I really needed it.
That's super fucking rad... though I assume there's a hardware override? There are a few hundred open issues on the firmware repo.
for t5 suite? It's pretty stable. Not sure what repo you're talking about but essentially they have backwards engineered the ROM on the ECU's to make tweaks and adjustments. It's a very flexible system from what I understand (though I haven't tuned with it at all, I do have one car where the computer is from a 2001 and it's backported into an 80's saab)
Oh I see. I misunderstood and thought you were saying you were going to control it with a Pi Pico. Read too fast.
No, for the cruise control chip? I am thinking a ATtiny85 or similar. It'll need some breadboarding since the inputs and outputs run at 12V, so some voltage stepping is required
Hacking and Saab's just seem to go together!
more than you know. For the most part, the entire T5 engine management system has been fully swapped into older 900's, so that should give us another decade before everyone moves over to doing megasquirt or other RYO ECU functions
This is a cool project, but can someone help be understand the "necessity" to do this to connect older PCs with PCMCIA "without the need to maintain an old linksys router"?
Current wireless APs are backwards compatible to 802.11b and in some cases also 802.11a, usually covering every standard between that and whatever the new standard was when they hit the market. For example, this Netgear AP and router in its spec sheet says specifically "- Backwards compatible with 802.11a/b/ g/n/ac WiFi". It's just not on the main feature list that's shortened for marketing. https://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/RAX38/RAX38v2_DS...
So I get the idea of a faster network connection on PCMCIA, up to the point that the 486 can actually use it anyway. I understand the coolness factor and the fun of solving this puzzle. I just don't understand the stated need. It's a lot of work compared to just connecting. The bigger deal for me would be this old laptop and card speaking WEP rather than WPA3.
Current wireless APs are backwards compatible to 802.11b and in some cases also 802.11a, usually covering every standard between that and whatever the new standard was when they hit the market. For example, this Netgear AP and router in its spec sheet says specifically "- Backwards compatible with 802.11a/b/ g/n/ac WiFi". It's just not on the main feature list that's shortened for marketing. https://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/RAX38/RAX38v2_DS...
So I get the idea of a faster network connection on PCMCIA, up to the point that the 486 can actually use it anyway. I understand the coolness factor and the fun of solving this puzzle. I just don't understand the stated need. It's a lot of work compared to just connecting. The bigger deal for me would be this old laptop and card speaking WEP rather than WPA3.
> The bigger deal for me would be this old laptop and card speaking WEP rather than WPA3.
As I understood, this is exactly helping with not having to use WEP. The Pico is simulating a NE2000 ethernet card, so any old pre-WPA Windows98 drivers are not used at all, but with the Pico doing ethernet-to-wifi conversion and WPA2 encryption.
As I understood, this is exactly helping with not having to use WEP. The Pico is simulating a NE2000 ethernet card, so any old pre-WPA Windows98 drivers are not used at all, but with the Pico doing ethernet-to-wifi conversion and WPA2 encryption.
Those PCMCIA linksys cards were amazing back in the day, especially since they did come with windows 98 drivers. You literally could grab any old laptop and make it into what a pi is today.
They even had CF/PCMICA wifi cards for PDA's and such. While this thread/topic isn't about that or such, I rushed to recall netsumbler and wardriving.
They even had CF/PCMICA wifi cards for PDA's and such. While this thread/topic isn't about that or such, I rushed to recall netsumbler and wardriving.
I have an SDIO 802.11b wifi card for one of my PDA's.
SD card formfactor.
It's interesting that SDIO has survived to this day as an interface. Just mostly staying on the same board between some SoC and peripherals.
It's interesting that SDIO has survived to this day as an interface. Just mostly staying on the same board between some SoC and peripherals.
Love the ThinkPad 235 — I have one too :)
It's a Ricoh Chandra in disguise! https://aichi.to/~thinkpad/tp235/index.html
It's a Ricoh Chandra in disguise! https://aichi.to/~thinkpad/tp235/index.html
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This is really cool! Also, I wonder if the author would share the CSS for the 80x25 VGA white on blue style text? Seems pretty much totally accurate!
Very cool project. Would love to seem more projects that use PicoW, 02W to bring 20th century HW into the 21st. And I love BIOS font theme!
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Wow I thought my electronics lab was messy lol.
Still, great work comes out of chaos.
Still, great work comes out of chaos.
how would such a GPIO <-> PCMCIA interface work? the author said the CPLD handles the voltage conversion and “address decoding”, but what I don’t understand is how does the data end up on the Pi?
According to the article, the author is using the RP2040's PIO peripheral, which has access to both the GPIO pins and FIFO buffers for communication with the main CPU.
The PIO is magic adjacent given the unit cost. A relative of mine is using it to bit-bang a proprietary ethernet-like protocol to fix some expensive-to-replace surveillance camera networks. He's a 10x (at least) engineer and he's impressed by the capabilities. "And then it's just some C-code, which is of course trivial."
pcmcia is an ISA like bus. You can just bitbang ISA with pico
https://github.com/polpo/picogus/blob/main/sw/isa_io.pio
https://github.com/polpo/picogus/blob/main/sw/isa_io.pio
One of my favorite deployments of it was to make a router out of a laptop - and use two of the xircom realport "mating" cards to give the laptop two real rj45 ports without any dongles:
https://www.premisesnetworks.com/doc/pc-card-0008
... combine that with an already existing rj45 on the laptop and you had a three-port gateway with a built-in KVM and a built-in UPS.