Wifi Enabling SC114 and SC126

My SC114 recently got Wifi-enabled, which means that I can use a plain telnet session to connect to the console, instead of having to connect the serial port to USB by wire. Before, I used a Raspberry Pi Zero W as “frontend” to make my SC114 available anywhere (this is still a good, cheap and flexible solution, but requires a little more maintenance).

I have built and installed the excellent ESP8266 Wifi Module; it comes preinstalled with firmware which effectively “mirrors” the TX and RX signals from the RC2014 bus to Wifi. The board is designed by Spencer Owen, owner of RFC2795 LTD. Spencer will support you well if you run into trouble!

Note that CP/M 2.2 does NOT “automagically” gain any networking powers 🙂 by default just the console I/O is mapped. But since the ESP8266 is a capable microcontroller, one could probably develop more advanced, custom networking utilities.

Below you see the SC114 motherboard with the ESP8266 added vertically. It is the board with the green dot label on it (the board right behind it, is the SC129 Digital I/O board).

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is DSC_6262-1024x683.jpg
SC114 with CP/M 2.2, Wifi and Digital I/O

I have also tested the Wifi module in an SC126, and it works perfectly with this system as well.

If you connect using Linux telnet, you may need to go to command mode using ^] and use the command:

telnet> mode char

to enable immediate echoing of individual characters, otherwise you might experience entering a line with no echo feedback, and only when you press return you get feedback. This is usually not what you want.