Could this be a possible USB solution for Amiga?

[ptyerman]

Bebek over on Amibay posted this link http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/SL811-USB-...item3a734feec1
of an interesting little USB board.
Could this be possible to hook up to a Amiga if a driver was made?
I had a read through the technical document and it states:

The SL811HS is an Embedded USB Host/Slave Controller
capable of communicating in either full speed or low speed. The
SL811HS interfaces to devices such as microprocessors, micro-controllers, DSPs, or directly to a variety of buses such as ISA,
PCMCIA, and others. The SL811HS USB Host Controller
conforms to USB Specification 1.1.

It would be nice if this could be made to interface with the Amiga as it's so cheap and affordable.

[mfilos]

Yeah it is possible.
This is the chip that was used in Thylacine which was recently released as OpenSource.
Schematics exist already and Polish fellow Amigans are discussing about a redesigned board.

[Amiga1992]

And where would it hook up? PCMCIA seems inconvenient, but perhaps the clockport?
It would be great to have an affordable USB solution.

[alkis21]

What's wrong with SUBWAY? I've used it for years.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by alkis21

What's wrong with SUBWAY? I've used it for years.

Subway costs 100 pounds, this board costs 9.99 dollars.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by alkis21

What's wrong with SUBWAY?

The price.

[alkis21]

Oh. Makes sense.

[hooverphonique]

yes, looking at the data sheets, it seems this can be hooked up to the clockport just by making an adapter from 2 connectors with the right connection routing.. a driver to run it is an issue though.. (I would take a look at that, but without a clockport on my amiga, it will be damn near impossible ;-)

Originally Posted by mfilos

Yeah it is possible.
This is the chip that was used in Thylacine which was recently released as OpenSource.
Schematics exist already and Polish fellow Amigans are discussing about a redesigned board.

kudos to releasing the schematics, but did they only release hand drawn ones - surely, they must've made cad versions as well?

[Amiga1992]

This sounds really interesting, any progress coming out of this discovery will be of great value

[ptyerman]

It would be really nice if one of the talented Amiga programmers attempted to create a driver for this module. The open sourcing of Thylacine is great news but how much would a board be in small numbers? A lot more than the $9.99 this module costs for sure. Plus the Thylacine board would have to be redesigned for the A500/600/1200 anyway. This could be a ready made cheap solution for the whole Amiga range!

[hooverphonique]

well, there's still the issue of getting a (legal) usb stack, isn't there?

[ptyerman]

Originally Posted by hooverphonique

well, there's still the issue of getting a (legal) usb stack, isn't there?

There is that yes. But you could say the same thing for Thylacine, unless there is a legal stack for that, in which case this module uses the same chip so should be "somewhat" compatible. Just an idea to ponder on!

[hooverphonique]

Originally Posted by ptyerman

There is that yes. But you could say the same thing for Thylacine, unless there is a legal stack for that, in which case this module uses the same chip so should be "somewhat" compatible. Just an idea to ponder on!

The driver for the Thylacine would probably be a very good starting point, yes, but my point was more along the lines of commercial usb solutions normally come with a stack bundled, which these days is Poseidon as it's the only one that works properly, afaik, and it seems E3B sits on all the licensing for it - if a standalone license (if available) costs anywhere near the same as one of the existing usb solutions, it might not be worth it

[desiv]

Anaias (sp?) might be an option too, if it could be modified to support that chipset...

desiv

[prowler]

Originally Posted by desiv

Anaias (sp?)

ANAIIS.

[jbenam]

Oh man, I guess we could start seeing cheap Amiga USB solutions for $30? (gotta add a lil' more for PCB costs and stuff)

Count me in!

If we could directly hook that board in the link with just a cable adapter that would be great, everyone could just purchase a cable adapter and that's it, just use an off-the-shelves product for cheap!

[Kehil]

And what about this ARM uCPU eval board http://www.st.com/internet/evalboard/product/250863.jsp It is +-20USD, 5V tolerant, has USB host and interface could be possibly programmed in C to mimic Subway.

[hooverphonique]

Originally Posted by desiv

Anaias (sp?) might be an option too, if it could be modified to support that chipset...

desiv

so what is anaiis exactly? an open source amiga (partial) usb stack? (the aminet readme is a bit vague on this).

[ptyerman]

Don't know if its open source or not, but seems pretty complete and still been worked on. (Note the last version date):

V1.06 08-Oct-2012

At the moment it only supports Subway and Highway though.

[Cymru]

The Australian folks released just THIS month not only the schematics and software for the Thylacine board, but also the source code. That had their own stack reportedly (?) used in OS 4.1

This ain't my field, but it appears to the poorly educated they put enough info out there to reproduce this card and use it. The final driver has Chris Hodges' name listed in it as the final "tweaker" and the card I bought last month (and just received yesterday) works great with the Poseidon stack. It is a clean, dare I say elegant design, and since no one else is releasing USB solutions, would be a very neat project for someone(s) to do. It would sell like crazy if there were a Zorro 2/3 and Clockport version. If this line of thought has been posted elsewhere just feel free to embarrass me and I'll remove it

I might reference this thread in "Hardware Support"