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

[Gene Beaird]

I haven’t tried this, but I do have a R-Pi, and was trying to set it up as a little file server for our home network.  Since I was out of ports on our little (and I mean little) home router, I tried running the thing wireless.  It seems the thing, or some part of it, goes to power-saver mode/sleep after about 3 hours.  Even after searching the ‘net for solutions, and turning every screen-saver, power-saver, network-saver I could find, it still goes offline at about 3 hours.  If I hook a monitor and keyboard to it, I can get to it.  If I leave it headless, over in a corner of my office, I lose access to it after that period of time.  

I’m sure this can be fixed, it seems others have, but it will be an issue with the thing right out of the box.  I got busy with other projects, including flooding from Harvey, so got a bit distracted and haven’t gotten back to it yet, but it is something to consider when trying a Pi.  They are pretty cool little things, though, especially when you consider you’re holding a computer in your hand.  

Regards,

Gene Beaird,
Pearland, Texas



> On Apr 17, 2018, at 11:00 AM, newtontalk-request at newtontalk.net wrote:
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2018 17:41:30 -0700
> From: Steven Frank <stevenf at panic.com>
> To: newtontalk at newtontalk.net
> Subject: [NTLK] Raspberry Pi as a wifi-to-PPP bridge for a Newton?
> Message-ID: <33B66FE8-4623-4209-9402-55C9858D95CF at panic.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset=us-ascii
> 
> 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