Sync serial bridging over Ethernet, was Re: [HECnet] Multi-floor household (DECnet) routing help needed

On 2013-01-17, at 10:20 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: I'd do it with an HDLC/SDLC-capable chip like a Z8530...offload as much from the firmware as possible, leave those cycles for protocol handling. Unless you meant wrapping bare ?DLC frames in packets? I was thinking that we don't even need to decapsulate the serial frame at all - just detect the start and end. All we're doing is emulating a piece of wire, after all. Unless we're putting in a fancy LCD status display, but I think that's overkill. Wrapping the data in UDP is simple. The HDLC layer could deal with error detection/correction. Yes! The problem is finding surplus time to embark on this. Maybe a few of us could collaborate on it? I have that problem as well, but I got really excited when you mentioned it, because I am doing a lot of designs with Ethernet now. I have a "base" design, a "hardware macro" if you will, that I've recycled several times. It's a Philips..erm, NXP LPC2300-series ARM7 with an on-chip Ethernet MAC, and all supporting hardware. I typically run FreeRTOS and uIP on them. The only things I have dev platforms are on my end are PIC and Atmel. I have some Zilog stuff, but I gave up on them several years ago. However, if you're able to put together the hardware layer, and there's a C compiler available for your platform, I can help on the software side. I've also done some software work for a local company that uses a TI Davinci processor. Interfacing an ?DLC engine to that would be a cakewalk starting from that base design as a head-start. I have a few tubes of Z8530s in PLCC-44 packages here. Oh oh. I think there's another project starting... :) -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA --- Filter service subscribers can train this email as spam or not-spam here: http://my.email-as.net/spamham/cgi-bin/learn.pl?messageid=410C8376613711E2A…