Subject: USB hacking (was Re: The easy guide to the news!)
Date: 22 Nov 2000 00:49:25 -0800
From: Wim Lewis
Newsgroups: alt.hackers

Eli the Bearded <*@qz.little-neck.ny.us> writes:
> ObHack:
> There is a type of web movie that is essentially a MIME
> multipart message, each part a new frame in the movie.
> (Content-type: multipart/x-mixed-replace) I used a
> download tool to grab one of those, without doing any
> parsing, then used the boundary string as the input
> record seperator in perl, and saved each image in it's
> own file. Now I have the movie in a format I can control.

Coworker'sHack: taking some old tty-based character animation movies
(originally run on a university's VMS machines, ten or fifteen years ago)
and converting them to x-mixed-replace (a.k.a. server-push) format.
Mmmm, nostalgia.

MyHack: noticing, somewhat belatedly, that the Keyspan USB serial port
adaptor consists of an Anchor Chips EZUSB downloadable-firmware chip,
an RS232 driver/receiver (similar to a MAX232), and very little
else. In particular, it has no nonvolatile firmware --- it's loaded at
configuration time by the device driver. This makes it the cheapest
USB hacking/prototyping platform I've run across --- at $40, it beats
both the ActiveWire board ($60 or so) and the USB SIMMstick (over
$100). It's one of the smaller Anchor parts, with only 16 IO lines
and 8K of ram, but that's plenty for many purposes. Conveniently, the
seven unused I/O lines in the one-port "PDA adaptor" are brought out
from the chip to an array of solder pads --- as if they're just
begging for someone to start attaching things to them ...

I'd be able to finish this hack with a triumphant "and now I have a
serial adaptor with a blinking light on it!", but SDCC does not want
to compile on my PPC box.

Details, for the curious, at

http://www.omnigroup.com/~wiml/soft/pic/keyspan.html


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