Re: [NTLK] Newton Bluetooth for newbies

Thomas,

i would have loved to give you shorter answers but i couldn't, so
here it is:

> Adriano,
>>
>> consider that 3KB/s correspond to 38400bps which is default speed of
>> any Newton serial port.
>>
>> Ethernet is configured to run at 230400bps by default instead.
>
> Are you suggesting that the PICO card is internally emulating a serial
> port, and hence using the Newton's serial i/o to transfer the
> bluetooth data? I cannot believe that it works that way. And even
> more, an Ethernet card in the Newton is surely not transmitting thru a
> serial port.

The Pico card makes emulation from Pcmcia to Bluetooth.

The Bluetooth chip installed on the card has a lot of hardware features,
which have to be enabled by dedicated software, called "stack".
In example, the 'serial' stack is called SPP (Serial Port Profile).

The SPP permits to estabilish a true serial connection without cables,
and is the one we use to etabilish communications with a bluetooth phone
and browse the internet.

Such serial connection is estabilished by the bluetooth chip in the
Pico Pcmcia,
not by the serial chip installed in the MessagePad itself, infact in
theory,
when using bluetooth serial port wirelessly we would be able to continue
to use the default MessagePad serial port, but this isn't possible on
actual version of Blunt.

The point is that Blunt is not only a Newton GUI to let us use the
Pico Card,
instead [if i understood it well] it also partially replaces the
stack installed on the card.
This is the cause of our pleasure on experiencing bluetooth on Newton,
but it's also cause of many matters.

> So, the limit of up to 230kbps makes no sense as such speed limit
> exists only when using the serial i/o hardware.

This limit on Newton OS exist on Ethernet (Appletalk), Simple Serial,
and Localtalk Serial.

Any Mac with a serial port also had that limit.
The older serial enabled Macs had a much lower limit too.

Note that the theoretical max speed of the serial port in Newtons
(which is a rs-422 Geoport connector) is of 2Mbit/s (2.000.000,00 bps).

> Instead, the PCMCIA drivers for the bluetooth and the ethernet cards
> should be talking directly to the cards and transfer the data in a
> faster way.

Although any bluetooth device will perform automatic speed
recognition by default,
most of them will have the max speed set by default at 115200bps
cause any Windows serial port won't let you get more than 115200bps,
also when emulating a serial port via Bluetooth.

>> Such setting can be easily configured to run faster and get a max
>> speed of 230400bps.
>
> How would I do that then? I can't see that Blunt has such an option.
> And if it could, why doesn't Blunt do it automatically?
>
> Thomas

On Blunt preferences there's the option for selecting the desired
connection speed.

Pico Pcmcias come with dedicated software which can be used to set
the max speed,
so if the internal settings of your card matches with Blunt settings,
you can get the highest possible speeds as for today on a MessagePad.

Adriano

'Green is better'
http://www.homepage.mac.com/adriano.angelillis/

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