Updates (Page 7)

July 12th (10:00PM)

Progress. Got hooked to Arduino, unfortunately I got junk out the other end. Stuff showed up, but it wasn't what I was after. Not sure what the story is, advice anyone? Good night to everyone (on east coast of US that is), over and out.

July 14th (9:54AM)

No luck, looks nicer if I just send use the ctrl-a and send the commands '14B' and 'T' to the Super Serial Card (SSC). It still looks like garbage though, I mean it's shaped a little like it ought to be, but I'm not getting nice strings. Also 'A' gets printed as '_'.

July 14th (10:47AM)

Gosh, I feel dumb. I still need to build that RS-232 level shifter. Of course it's not working, RS-232 doesn't work on TTL voltage levels. 0v to 5v NOT EQUAL TO -5v to 5v! I should have surmised that sooner, given that sending characters works just fine when it's connected to the PCs hardware serial port. Now, if I could just find that other transistor... At least now it seems more hopeful.

July 15th (5:30PM)

Naturally I found the "missing" transistors yesterday at 10pm right when I meant to go to bed. So,I put together the level shifter and, NO DICE! It did nothing except make sure I could see nothing at all on the other end. The Tx/Rx leds worked fine. For the record it took 10 days to get to doing this, for nothing. So, I challenge anyone to explain to me why both CTRL-H and SHIFT-D on the Apple IIe are what the PC says is CTRL-W. Anyway, half-way through RetroChallenge and hardly started, feeling a bit disappointed. More updates tomorrow I hope, over and out.

July 16th (7:16AM)

Today, after some thinking and searching, I'm going to posit that whoever designed the arduino designed in a level shifter. Not absolutely certain, but the fact that a level shifter doesn't work with it and that attaching it to the Apple IIe's SSC doesn't fry the arduino seems odd if that's not true. Anyway, still got problems with not getting the characters I want (ie. sending 'A' results in '_'). So, more work on that later today I hope, over and out.

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