[NTLK] Raspberry Pi as a wifi-to-PPP bridge for a Newton?

[Jake Bordens]

I think this is all very possible, and I believe there have been some who have done it.  Elias was talking about squeezing a Pi (Zero W I assume) into a PCMCIA card.

I originally chose the ConnectOne module for my internal WiFi card because it had an onboard PPP server.  ConnectOne no longer makes the module, and the successor (also discontinued) doesn't have the PPPD function.  It also had an extended AT command set. You could for example, establish an SSH or HTTPS session using an AT command.

Ideally someone would figure out how to get an ESP8266 or ESP-32 to behave as a PPPD server.  I've seen some SLIP implementations as well, which might work, as NIE also supports SLIP. (https://github.com/martin-ger/esp_slip_router is one that I haven't tried myself yet)

The ESP-32 also has a BLE radio.  Paired with an iOS app, you could use BLE to synchronize the Newton's calendar entries to an iOS calendar.   Devices like the Pebble did this pretty successfully.  The Newton's "Routing" interface would work well since it doesn't assume an always connected state.   "Send email" could be one transaction over BLE for example.

Jake



On 4/16/18, 8:46 PM, "Steven Frank" <stevenf at panic.com> wrote:

    It just occurred to me that it'd be possible (in theory at least) to set something up like pppd on a Raspberry Pi, and use it like a serial-to-wifi bridge for the Newton.
    
    Has anyone tried this?  Did it work?  Was it in any way useful?  I probably should've searched the archive first.  :) 
    
    I guess it would be a fair amount of gear to carry around (Pi with battery pack, serial cables..) but it would be compatible with modern wifi standards (unlike PCMCIA wifi cards) while appearing to be just a dial-up ISP to the Newton.  Battery draw on the Newton would be relatively minimal too.
    
    Also, someone back there (points at list archive) was talking about making an HTTP proxy that re-formatted websites on-the-fly for consumption on the Newton.  You could run that on the same Pi and have sort of an all-in-one Internet Adapter Device for Newtons that doesn't require any additional hardware on the Newton side.
    
    In theory.
    
    Steven
    
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