[NTLK] Newton USB Dongle

[Grant Hutchinson]

On 2017-02-05, at 5:47 AM, Jake Bordens wrote:

> Side note, I would like to acquire one of these “Adriano” dongles, if anyone has a stash of them and is willing to part with one. Would make development a little easier. My guess is that they are rare, and folks don’t want to part with them, and for that I’d understand.

Not sure if this helps, but I was able to get in contact with Adriano about a year ago and he passed along the following information about his dongles:

> About the Newton, the ICs I did use to build the most useful (and
> sold) accessory I made (Newton USB Dongle) went out of production
> years ago. That was used to low down rs232 levels to TTL over the
> interconnect on serial port 1.
> 
> USB interfacing was built using FTDI IC's standard schematics.
> Every system would report that (a FTDI device has been connected
> to the USB port), but a few people in the past needed a quick
> answer on NewtonTalk about drivers, I was not online and they
> almost freaked out. Well, FTDI drivers are ubiquitous and
> updated.
> 
> I am reporting to you with such details just in case in the
> future somebody would come again asking about generic drivers.
> 
> Maybe you would love to know that other than generic drivers, at
> some point I spent some time to build a customized driver that
> made it possible to run the serial connection stably at 460Kbit
> (doubling the usual fastest 230K). I doubt anything ever runt
> faster on a MessagePad 2x00. Pretty wild :D
> 
> This was feasible tweaking the FTDI drivers using their own free
> tools. Such custom driver is stuck in a virtual Windows machine
> somewhere...


g.