Wireless for old Amigas?

[ferix]

Well, If you can live with wires and wait for me to finish my project, I'm building a serial to ethernet bridge (SLIP to TCP/IP over ethernet).
Yo can see some photos here: http://www.amiga.org/forums/album.php?albumid=54

The goal is to provide a small bridge from the slip side to the ethernet one. It implemented a smart bridge that takes care of the arp tables and packet fragmentation, routing, and other TCP/IP over ethernet related questions.

The hardware part is almost finished. Now, I'm making some hardware tests. Once I finished them, I'll start with the software part.

[ferix]

A *far* better solution is to add an ethernet port to your Amiga which is relatively easy to do on all models except the A500 and A1000.

For those two models, you can add a Z2 busboard sidecar, and then add a Z2 ethernet card. This is an expensive way to do it, but it works.

As you say, It's expensive...
If you are a DIY man, It's very easy to interface an ISA ethernet card to those amiga models.
The same on PCMCIA. PCMCIA is only an extension to ISA bus. I've connected PCMCIA cards to AVR microcontroles with success.
The problem is always the same... drivers...
I wrote my self lots of network drivers for linux and some microcontrollers, but these have well known (and well documented) apis, or no api at all (like microcontrolers). The amiga's problem is to write a sana2 compliant device driver... As far as I know, ofcourse.

Once you have ethernet, then you can add an ethernet -> wifi adapter. [..]

If you get a fonera, you can hack It to work as ethernet to wifi bridge. And if you build the serial adapter, you can even make your own slip to ethernet or wifi bridge. I made It my self, and It works nice.
The only problem is that linux kernel doesn't manage bridges with diferent MTU sizes. So, yo have to configure the slip interface to a MTU of 1500 bytes to match the ethernet MTU... And It could be a high load for the amiga.
That's not a problem for ethernet to wifi briges. Wifi uses ethernet frames under the link layer, so It uses same MTU size.
You can get a NEW fonera+ for about 30 euros (about $45 or 27 pounds):
https://shop.fon.com/FonShop/shop/ES/ShopController?view=product&product=PRD-018&language=en

Note: My design takes care of it. It automatically fragments incomming packets that exceed the slip MTU size... At least is what I have planned...

RS232 is VERY cpu intensive on the internal chipset, not to mention dirt slow -- maxing out at 0.1Mbps.

Yes, you're right, but It's the cheaper and easier option, I think...

ferix: The serial-to-ethernet project looks interesting. I wonder what you have planned do show in the display.. Are you planning to sell these things when you get it finished, and do you have any hint about the price tag? (or what are the axrox. parts cost if you plan to release it as a DIY project.)

I'm not planning to sell It. Maybe, I'll free the schematics and sources, as soon as I'll have a full working prototype.
I don't know how much I spent on It, because It's almost made with spare and sample parts, but I guess It would cost about 20 euros or so, without the LCD.
The LCD is not necessary at all. I included It for configuration and status information, but you can do the same directly by the serial port.

[ferix]

If I understood It well, It emulates a serial port connection over the wifi, and then you need to provide the communication protocol (PPP in that case), but you need a PC as host on one side for acting as a ppp server and for routing...
It's the same as a null modem connection between your amiga and your PC, but without wires... It doesn't connect your amiga to the network (directly).

[ferix]

If you can attach a PCMCIA card that already has an Amiga driver, would it not be fairly straightforward to adapt the driver to work with this configuration?

Hmmm... It depends on how you connect It. If you are able to mimic the gayle's pcmcia interface, yes, you can use standard drivers.
PCMCIA work similar to Amiga's autoconfig.
There are three memory mappings on the PCMCIA bus. The config space, the memory space (up to 16 Mb) and the I/O space (up to 64k I/O).
On power on or reset, you have to read the required resources from the config space, and assign them. This includes the base address of the pcmcia card (within the 16Mb window fot memory and/or 64Kb for I/O) and the interrupts lines.
As you see, It's not an easy task, and there's a lot of ways of doing It.
The easy way is to interface an ISA card...
Recently, I made a linux driver for an ISA based ethernet chip that can be directly connected to the amiga bus. It's very easy to program and interface. It's the DM9000 from Davicom.
It can be connected to 8, 16 or 32 bit buses.
If you want, I can make a basic design for the amiga.

[ferix]

I was thinking more that the existing drivers could be modified to support your new interface. My Prism-II wireless driver for example is open source, and the code is modular with regard to buses: internally, there are modules for PCMCIA, PCI etc. You would just need to add a small "A500" module; the core wireless chipset driver would stay the same.

In such case, yes, It can be done. But you need to rewrite the driver, you can't use the "plain" driver you use on A600 or  A1200.
As I said, the real problem is to write the driver, not the hardware.